James Wolcott Quotes

54 quotes in 1418 categories

• Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.
• I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a…
• I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself…
• It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both…
• Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.
• Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.
• Telling writers to shut up is a sure way to keep them talking.
• High expectations weren't nurtured in my neck of nowhere back then - children weren't fawned over from an early age as 'gifted' and groomed for…
• I understand that one of the purposes of bipartisanship is to cram something difficult and necessary down the American people's gullets for which neither party…
• My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.
• A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the…
• A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our…
• At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.
• Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.
• Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.
• It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.
• People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.
• The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.
• Today a celebrity sex video isn't a stigma that requires penance and smarm removal; it's a branding device, a platform enhancer, a show reel.
• What stars do in their off-hours is a never-ending source of diddling curiosity to the tabloid sensibility.

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