COMMONPLACE BOOK, MARCH

I think my credentials as a conservative are impeccable. I think it's because he is not conservative that George W. Bush is in such terrible trouble. – Jeffery Hart on C-SPAN


There's a weird attitude about sex in this country, particularly, and I've had far more sex than I've had fights on water towers against guys with super powers, so why people should be freaked out by the fact that I write about characters with sex lives or that I enjoy sex, is something I'll never understand. –Chuck Austen


“James Cameron is uncertain about his next project, but he's promised it will be a love story, set either in Jonestown or on TWA Flight 800.” -- unknown internet signature

[In] “.... Woody Allen's ‘Manhattan’, a picture in which, toward the end, the Woody Allen character makes a list of reasons to stay alive. 'Groucho Marx' is one reason, and 'Willie Mays' is another. The second movement of Mozart's 'Jupiter' Symphony. Louis Armstrong's 'Potato Head Blues.' Flaubert's ‘A Sentimental Education’.
This list is modishly eclectic, a trace wry, definitely OK with real linen; and notable, as raisons d'être go, in that every experience it evokes is essentially passive. This list of Woody Allen's is the ultimate consumer report, and the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring Madame Bovary.” -- Joan Didion

"Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left. I know, of course, that the term "left" does not have the same meaning and ramifications here that it does in France. And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an authentic "left" in the United States, in the European sense. But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking. And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the other side--to the contrary, through the looking glass of the American "left" lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or Thoreau, is thoroughly enigmatic." -- Bernard-Henri Levy, "A Letter to the American Left"



"’Who comes to writers’ conferences?’ you ask. A random sample of twenty students will contain six recent divorcees, three preachers’ wives in middle life, five schoolteachers of no particular age or sex, two foxy grandmas, one sweet old widower with true tales to tell about railroading in Idaho, one real writer, one not merely angry but absolutely furious young man, and one physician with forty years’ worth of privileged information that he wants to sell to the movies for a blue million.” -- Kurt Vonnegut


Friends of Wonkette in Iraq found the following sites censored by the Marines:
* Wonkette – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.wonkette.com/) is categorized as: Forum/Bulletin Boards, Politics/Opinion.”
* Bill O’Reilly (www.billoreilly.com) – OK
* Air America (www.airamericaradio.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”
* Rush Limbaugh (www.rushlimbaugh.com) – OK
* ABC News “The Note” – OK
* Website of the Al Franken Show (www.alfrankenshow.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”
* G. Gordon Liddy Show (www.liddyshow.us) – OK
* Don & Mike Show (www.donandmikewebsite.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.donandmikewebsite.com/) is categorized as: Profanity, Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies.”

“The America the ACLU defends does not stifle debate, engage in searches without judicial review, hold prisoners without due process, or participate in torture." -- Scott Crichton, Montana ACLU

"There are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots They will do anything for the buck, they wouldn't care, if you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face." -- William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, on Gary Busey's participation in the Turkish film "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq"

"I remember when everybody won Tonys for ‘Dreamgirls’, and they all got up there thanking God for letting them win this award, and I was thinking to myself: God is silent on the Holocaust, but he involves himself in the Tony Awards? It doesn't seem very likely." -- a character in Christopher Durang's “Laughing Wild”

See also: Random Quotations, Commonplace Book:January, Commonplace Book: December