Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.

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

Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.

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

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.

With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.

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.

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 future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.

Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.

Life is full of wonder.

The future is hidden even from those who make it.

Incident piled on incident no more makes life than brick piled on brick makes a house.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

I fear the financial crisis of 1998 may become the trade crisis of 1999.

Where are you? Here What time is it? Now What are you? This moment.

People have a lot less leniency for some reason for women straying from a relationship than they do for men.

That was like swatting June bugs off a fly.

On the day of your birth, the Creator filled countless storehouses, set aside for your use and yours alone.