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

"We thought philosophy ought to be patient and unravel people's mental blocks. Trouble with doing that is, once you've unravelled them, their heads fall off."

"During the years when the barely educated immigrants were being replaced by barely educated native sons, Hollywood . . . proved a more reliable, cost-effective means of securing world domination than any nuclear arsenal or diplomatic démarche."

"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?"

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