“We worship entertainment as much as technology, and there's nothing less entertaining than grief. That's why God invented lorazepam, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and vodka and television - which in my experience work best in combination, with a pizza.”

“[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)”

“Consider this: Every day in America more people get their evening news from Entertainment Tonight, an insipid syndicated television show covering celebrity news, than from CBS, NBC, and ABC combined.”

“Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, 'I just want to be entertained.' This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means that we shouldn't go to movies together.”

“Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”

“And entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.”