An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.
A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room.
All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.
Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.
'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' is without a doubt the best film we are ever likely to see on the subject - unless there is a sequel, which is unlikely, because at the end, the Lincolns are on their way to the theater.
We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.
A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.
The idea that a book can advise a woman how to capture a man is touchingly naive. Books advising men how to capture a woman are far less common, perhaps because few men are willing to admit to such a difficulty. For both sexes, I recommend a good novel, offering scenarios you might learn from, if only because they reflect a lot of doubt.
One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments.
I'm kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That's fine with me.
Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.
Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.
There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.
No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.
Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.
It's not often a thriller keeps me wound up as well as 'Headhunters' did. I knew I was being manipulated and didn't care. It was a pleasure to see how well it was being done.
Lebanon was at one time known as a nation that rose above sectarian hatred; Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. All of that was blown apart by senseless religious wars, financed and exploited in part by those who sought power and wealth. If women had been in charge, would they have been more sensible? It's a theory.
I remember when a Coke came in a six-ounce bottle, and delicious it was. Now it comes in sizes so big that I question how the human bladder can deal with the intake.
Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.
I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.
