"As that little child in the spacesuit in The Seven year Itch grew up, three things would become obvious to him. He would be aware that he hadn’t been trained to really understand the history of mechanization, and was insufficient in that regard; that he hadn’t been trained to be anything like Winston Churchill, and was going to be permanently insufficient in that regard; and that he wasn’t actually going to be able to look a mine worker in the eye, and was going to be insufficient in that regard. He was going to be aware that he had been a Video Ranger from the start, and that he was going to have to keep on being a Video Ranger, and that he was going to have to learn to laugh about that. And, also, because he wanted to get married, to be a man in some sense, he was going to have to be serious about something. He was going to have to touch base with some real thing going on in his father, and what he got hold of was the irony in his father....And the evolution of that process is toward David Letterman…. We were going to have to grow up to be entirely ironic in our visceral reactions to our own manhood."

“Wonder was the grace of the country.”

“The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it.”

“Maybe that’s why everyone died young. Some of the questions you didn’t dare ask about Earth People’s Park were: Where is it? Who will run it? Will anyone want to do the real work? Like the global economy now, it was just something assumed, and the people in the room were there to embody the zeitgeist of it and kill the people who didn’t belong in the body of the zeitgeist.”

“By 1956, out of all the Cultural Avatars and Vectors available in 1950, THE GIRL had won. Authority. They’d won the war, in a way.”

“: …I saw when I was young that, in fact, when you got to the top or toward the top of things, you found, indeed, very flawed but glamorous people, people who were, in fact, not thinking about the kinds of problems that the blind man was thinking about in 1943, not acting intuitively and bravely and in some kind of harmony with nature as that blind man in Saboteur was acting, and certainly not taking on impossible tasks. People were acting in a kind of what I’ve come to call a deutero-Hemingway way: they were preserving their own vitality by being adventurous within the media. The James Stewart character is someone who roams the world, but with a camera, not a gun, and not like Schweitzer, setting up modes of change in impossible places. He’s touring the world adventurously in the interest of preserving his masculine independence, but he’s doing it with a camera.”

“…the film is moving to me because it shows his vital uniqueness walking—a new kind of old American, innocent, with old American experience, and that’s always been our formula, our innocence, plus a unique kind of experience that other people haven’t had in other lands—walking with all of that, plus physical beauty, into Rear Window—down-the-drain-land.”