Top 40 James Wolcott Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.”

— James Wolcott

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

— James Wolcott

3. “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

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

— James Wolcott

5. “Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.”

— James Wolcott

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.”

— James Wolcott

10. “Robert Pattinson is rebel cool incarnated – the James Dean of the undead.”

— James Wolcott

11. “Like Andy Warhol and unlike God Almighty, Larry King does not presume to judge; all celebrities are equal in his eyes, saints and sinners alike sharing the same ‘Love Boat’ voyage into the dark beyond, a former sitcom star as deserving of pious send-off as Princess Diana.”

— James Wolcott

12. “With ‘Black Swan,’ the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.”

— James Wolcott

13. “Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.”

— James Wolcott

14. “As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal.”

— James Wolcott

15. “Mitt Romney – he had a Rock Hudson thing going, shoeblack hair and a well-hung resume, but even for a shameless, position-shifting phony he seemed a trifle insincere.”

— James Wolcott

16. “Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild indulgence was for other people, the non-worriers.”

— James Wolcott

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “It isn’t that NPR is matriarchal but that it has dedicated itself to not being patriarchal in its outlook and presentation, stipulating from the outset that its headline voices would not resound across the fruited plains from big male bags of air sent from Mount Olympus.”

— James Wolcott

21. “It’s one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.”

— James Wolcott

22. “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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23. “At ‘The Village Voice,’ there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.”

— James Wolcott

24. “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

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

— James Wolcott

26. “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

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

— James Wolcott

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Republicans: steely, rational, paternalistic, respectful of authority, easy to herd, the party of No. Democrats: sugary, emotional, idealistic, yearning for novelty, hard to marshal, the party of Oh Yeah, Baby, Make Mama Feel Good.”

— James Wolcott

31. “Historically, Hollywood comedy has arrived in skinny envelopes. From fence post Buster Keaton to herky-jerky Jerry Lewis to wiry nerve-bundle Woody Allen to hung-loose Richard Pryor to whippy contortionist Jim Carrey, its comics and clowns have tended to be sliced thin and bendable.”

— James Wolcott

32. “I understand the people-watching, but I’ve never done it where people have to race to three different shows, from here to there. I mean, the biggest zoo I ever faced was Comic Con, and Comic Con takes place in one big hangar.”

— James Wolcott

33. “What stars do in their off-hours is a never-ending source of diddling curiosity to the tabloid sensibility.”

— James Wolcott

34. “With Barack Obama as president and the super-happening Michelle Obama as First Lady, you would think a new tone, a new tune, a kicky new jazzitude, would have entered Washington discourse, but it remains a landlocked island unto itself, held captive by its tribal fevers.”

— James Wolcott

35. “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

36. “The unhappy irony is that, while ‘Glee’ is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues.”

— James Wolcott

37. “In 2008, Barack Obama did get Democrats hyperventilating, whipped up to a creamy froth, while John McCain creaked ahead like a cranky granddad whom Republicans let move to the front of the buffet line, deferring to seniority, as they had in 1996, when Bob Dole turtled to the top of the ticket.”

— James Wolcott

38. “Since I’m a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger’s hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain.”

— James Wolcott

39. “What a turnaround in sentiment ‘Glee’ exemplifies. It was only a few years ago that pursuing the dream of a Broadway career or cabaret stardom relegated some poor yearning dope to a lavender ghetto of losers, self-deluders, and social rejects.”

— James Wolcott

40. “A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.”

— James Wolcott

41. “People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.”

— James Wolcott

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Telling writers to shut up is a sure way to keep them talking.”

— James Wolcott

45. “I understand that one of the purposes of bipartisanship is to cram something difficult and necessary down the American people’s gullets for which neither party has the fortitude to assume full responsibility. It’s a way of turning a possible gangplank into a teeter-totter.”

— James Wolcott