Anthony Lane quotes:

The obvious precedent for Beijing 2008 was the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Both were showcases for a muscle-flexing nation, although Hitler made an elementary error when he chose not to dress his young National Socialists in lime-green catsuits laced with twinkling fairy lights.

The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.

There is more suspense, more dramatic torque, in one page of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's heart-racked ruminations onthe Christian consciencethaninall Demi Moore's woodland gallops and horizontal barn dancing.

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is now fourteen, and, while he gives little sign of doing what Lord Rochester planned to do at the same age, there are nonetheless changes afoot. Harry's voice, like that of his best friend, Ron (Rupert Grint), sounds like the mating cry of an oboe, and, worse still, the two cease to be best friends.

No new reader, however charitable, could open â??Fifty Shades of Grey,â? browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth.

That is why the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics; all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive - books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all.

I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh.

Children, viewed from one angle, are philosophy in motion.

We are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.

So much to relish and remember.

We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process.

That's the trouble with cookbooks. Like sex education and nuclear physics, they are founded on an illusion. They bespeak order, but they end in tears.

Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but in all honesty, a cookbook is something you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed.