Exhilarating. Radical Grace moved me to tears with its portrayal of good people putting their beliefs into action in ways that transcend all ideological boundaries.

Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.

One of the weapons Marvel used in its climb to comic-book dominance was a willingness to invent new characters at a dizzying speed. There are so many Marvel universes, indeed, that some superheroes do not even exist in one another's worlds, preventing gridlock.

There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

Political correctness is the fascism of the 90's, it is this rigid feeling that you have to keep your ideas and your way of looking at things within very narrow boundaries or else you'll offend someone. Certainly one of the purposes of journalism is to challenge just that way of thinking, and certainly one of the purposes of criticism is to break boundaries, that's also one of the purposes of art.

I do not fear death. I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.