Words, isolated in the velvet of radio, took on a jeweled particularity. Television has quite the opposite effect: words are drowned in the visual soup in which they are obliged to be served.

Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one's belt buckled.

Talk isn't work. Work is when you have pages in the evening that you didn't have in the morning.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

One can watch hours and hours of TV without actually losing interest, but, as with Chinese food, one is rarely left with much residue of nourishment.

As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.

Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at the same time.

The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

Vichy proves one thing: if you don't want to know how low your fellow citizens can fall, and crawl, don't lose a war.

People resent articulacy, as if articulacy were a form of vice.

Restoration brings refreshment.

Back then: to be paid more, one needed to increase the number of things that are by him known. Today: to be paid more, one needs to increase the number of people by whom he is known.

Just because a romantic relationship ends doesn't mean that the other facets of your relationship have to end... or, indeed, doesn't mean they can't get better.

I could as easily bail out the Potomac River with a teaspoon as attend to all the details of the army.

When people are laughing, they're generally not killing one another.

The most favourable laws can do very little towards the happiness of people when the disposition of the ruling power is adverse to them.

I don't regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corny way.

Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.

No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself

You don't just see and feel the movie, you see and feel every day you worked on it.