A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well. |
A sign of celebrity is often that their name is worth more than their services. |
A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services |
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you. |
America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality. |
An image . . . is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service. |
As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves. |
As you make your bed, so you must lie in it. |
Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety. |
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know. |
Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be. |
Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands. |
I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortur |
I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early. |
I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one. |