Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books.
The madness of TV is the madness of human life. Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaverlike tunneling to the top. The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. . . . Criticism is ceremonial revivification.