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My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.

James Wolcott

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James Wolcott
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: December 10
Journalist
Novelist
New York City
New York
Papers
Norman
Application
Peanut
Paper
Packed
College
Sandwich
High
Peanuts
Read
Sandwiches
School
Butter
Mailer
Like
Essays
Crunchy

More quotes by James Wolcott

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Who elected Larry King America's grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.
James Wolcott
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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
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Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.
James Wolcott
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And what could be a hotter ticket than the improbable triumph of 'The Book of Mormon,' the musical-comedy moon shot of the season? Its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, of Comedy Central's 'South Park,' are the most unlikely Rodgers and Hammerstein team ever to bowl a thundering strike.
James Wolcott
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It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.
James Wolcott
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'Hairspray' was a movie turned Broadway musical turned Hollywood remake, and that is the 'Lion King' circle of life as we know it in Times Square, the creative loop that swings for the stars and sometimes crashes into the upper deck.
James Wolcott
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Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.
James Wolcott
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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
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People want somebody to be a daredevil, even if they're not going to be a daredevil themselves.
James Wolcott
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I've always stayed on the periphery of things. When I used to go to the punk clubs and things like that, I was never up front. I always wanted to be in the back, or on the side, because I wanted to get the whole view, rather than be staring up at someone's nostrils.
James Wolcott
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What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
James Wolcott
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Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.
James Wolcott
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I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.
James Wolcott
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Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with 'Hardly Working' and 'Cracking Up.'
James Wolcott
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A typical 'Larry King Live' is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he's strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject.
James Wolcott
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At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.
James Wolcott
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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
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Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.
James Wolcott
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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
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Slashing its way to the finish line, Black Swan is the first ballet movie for highbrow horror fans for whom ballet itself signifies little to nothing. Those of us who know and love ballet can only look on it with a different kind of horror.
James Wolcott