Words matter. These are the best James Wolcott Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Many questions torment America in its dark night of the soul, questions more urgently pressing, and yet it must be asked: How did we get stuck with Piers Morgan? Who is he, why is he here, is he returnable?
People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.
Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.
A typical ‘Larry King Live’ is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he’s strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject.
The Beltway media went into caroming-off-the-walls hysterics over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, whipping itself into a flaming casserole even as Clinton’s standing with the American people remained upright and firm, so to speak.
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 the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.
How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?
As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects – digitize and dematerialize – we approach a ‘Star Trek’ future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles.
Like Andy Warhol and unlike God Almighty, Larry King does not presume to judge; all celebrities are equal in his eyes, saints and sinners alike sharing the same ‘Love Boat’ voyage into the dark beyond, a former sitcom star as deserving of pious send-off as Princess Diana.
The advent of DVD/Blu-ray reissues of classic Hollywood and foreign films has been a boon to film buffs, who can now study their favorites in all their glistening detail and restored palettes.
As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal.
Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with ‘Hardly Working’ and ‘Cracking Up.’
Pop music has been all but relegated to the remainder bin at MTV and VH1, where high-maintenance concoctions such as Paris Hilton, Flavor Flav, and Hulk Hogan’s biohazard clan of bleached specimens provide endless hours of death-hastening diversion.
It’s one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.
It was with 9/11 that I came to fully appreciate and embrace NPR’s irreplaceability as a sanity preserver, its unique virtues as first responder on the burning scene.
Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.
Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.
My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.
Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.
What stars do in their off-hours is a never-ending source of diddling curiosity to the tabloid sensibility.
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 partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.
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 whole world in a snow globe.
What a turnaround in sentiment ‘Glee’ exemplifies. It was only a few years ago that pursuing the dream of a Broadway career or cabaret stardom relegated some poor yearning dope to a lavender ghetto of losers, self-deluders, and social rejects.
One reason I’m such a wayward prognosticator of rightwing trends is that I’m incapable of blacking out enough neural sectors to see the world through reptilian-brained eyes, a prerequisite for any true channeling of the mean resentments and implanted fears that drive hardcore conservatives.
Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.