Quotes by James Wolcott

“Its one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.”

“Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.”

“The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.”

“Youre sitting there having breakfast at the St. Regis with Scooter Aspen, buttering each others toast, and somehow the name Valerie Flame pops up in your notebook without you knowing how it got there! Its your handwriting, sure enough, but rack your brain much as you will, you just cant remember which little birdie tweeted that name into your ear.”

Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie, reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from pure ballistic force of personality, like Joe Pesci in a bad mood. I can respect bad acting that owns its own style.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesnt have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesnt explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

Who elected Larry King Americas grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.

Its the contemporary woman that movies dont know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.