James Wolcott – 13 Quotes

13 Quotes by James Wolcott

High expectations weren’t nurtured in my neck of nowhere back then – children weren’t fawned over from an early age as ‘gifted’ and groomed for a prizewinning future self-esteem was considered something you had to pick from the garden yourself.

– James Wolcott

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

– James Wolcott

After a decade this glum, we deserved a shot of ‘Glee,’ a show that restored our faith in the power of song, the beauty of dance, and the magic of ‘spirit fingers’ to chase our cares and woes into somebody else’s backyard.

– James Wolcott

Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.

– James Wolcott

Who elected Larry King America’s grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.

– James Wolcott

A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.

– James Wolcott

As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects – digitize and dematerialize – we approach a ‘Star Trek’ future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles.

– James Wolcott

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

– James Wolcott

On August 28, 2010, Fox News messiah Glenn Beck hosted a ‘Restoring Honor’ revival meeting featuring sexy guest star Sarah Palin, much as Bob Hope would roll out Raquel Welch in white go-go boots on his U.S.O. tours to give our fighting men a morale lift in their khakis.

– James Wolcott

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom – it doesn’t have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations – but that doesn’t explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

– James Wolcott

It’s the contemporary woman that movies don’t know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.

– James Wolcott

The days when the words ‘Hollywood actor’ framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics – candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike – is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

– James Wolcott

Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie, reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from pure ballistic force of personality, like Joe Pesci in a bad mood. I can respect bad acting that owns its own style.

– James Wolcott