Quotes from Lee Siegel

Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities that come from being who you are. I think that is why the blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self.

Every man is a hero to his alias.

Television has to reflect back to you your own sense of security. It also has to mirror your sense of your own decency and your own limitations.

I am too childlike to be immature.

In 1986, human nature in America started to change. That year, 'The Oprah Winfrey Show,' based in Chicago, became nationally syndicated, and the country entered the beginning stages of a quiet cultural revolution.

I have a confession to make. For years, I earned a living - or a sort of living - writing negative book reviews.

In urban America, you do not so much meet a romantic partner as inherit the product of someone else's romantic crimes.

Ever since the romantic comedy-drama 'She's Gotta Have It' antagonized black women and black men in 1986, Spike Lee's films have enjoyed the outrage of various groups.

The terrorist threat is so cloudy, faceless, and vague, so manipulable by political purposes, so definitely present but indefinitely manifested, that it sometimes feels interchangeable with everyday dread itself.

It became inevitable that television would address life's mundane problems because television itself is so mundane, part of the ordinary flow of time the way those problems are.

Instead of books, art, theatre, and music being consigned to specialized niches, we might have a criticism that better reflects the eclecticism of our time, a criticism that takes in various arts all at once.

I react very badly when mediocrity throws a tantrum of entitlement.

The sitcom's traditional role has been to comfort the viewer who feels burdened by the unreality of American expectations.

Every 'Oprah Winfrey Show' has about it the aura of Oprah's own life, just as the rituals and sacraments of a religion are suffused with the life of the religion's founder. Above the testimony of Oprah's guests hovers what viewers know about Oprah's experience.