A scary movie puts a lot of people, a mob, in one place. There are advantages to that because the panic runs through the audience. If it's a good movie, the fear jumps from one person to the next. You can find yourself screaming just because everybody around you is screaming. There's a real atmosphere of terror. It's also visual, which means that you can't look away from this thing - it's happening. You're in the dark. It's like a nightmare. It's like a dream. It's very, very visual. It works on all those levels.

Make-up covers a multitude of sins.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library.

Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.

Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess.

Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force.