“Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well, it raises the quality of human life.”

“...it had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered--what matters so often in the course of everyday human life--were the surfaces and the joins. ”

“As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.”

“Entertainment has a bad name...The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. ”

“Even the most casual study of the record...would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken.”

“Yet entertainment--as I define it, pleasure and all--remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.”

“They had an old-fashioned sincerity...that touched Archy in this time when everything good in life was either synthesised in transgenic cyborg vats or shade-grown in small batches by a Buddhist collective of blind ex-Carmelite Wiccans.”