Richard Schickel quotes:

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.

He was the first to conceive of movies as an art form. His belief was that if the traditional art form would not find room for him, then he would make an art form of his own.

Any dramatic series the producers want us to take seriously as a representationof contemporary reality cannot be taken seriously as a representation ofanything - except a show to be ignored by anyone capable of sitting uprightin a chair and chewing gum simultaneously.

That common cold of the male psyche, fear of commitment.

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.

Divorced, not loving their abandoned children as much as they loathe their former wives, directing a combination of need and hostility toward the women who drift in and out of their new lives, they are, as [one character] puts it, "involved in a variety of pharmaceutical experiments.

Luck always favors the comely.

There is a limbo of the lost through which American males of a certain age and status almost inevitably must pass these days.

This is a soul under perpetual migraine attack.

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration."

A movie star is not an artist, he is an art object.

He who does not like you will defame you in jest.

The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want.