Penelope Gilliatt

"It would be unfair to suggest that one of the most characteristic sounds of the English Sunday is the sound of Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree."

"People in a temper often say a lot of silly, terrible things they mean."

"Filmmaking has now reached the same stage as sex—it’s all technique and no feeling."

"Jokes are ideally pleasurable. They are an act of assassination without a corpse, a moment of total annihilation that paradoxically makes anything possible."

"A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species."

"Boston is one of the few American cities that regrets the past...Boston's like England. Up to its ears in yellowing photographs."

"Why is it that beautiful women never seem to have curiosity?" "Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces."

"Russians have always been hugely concerned with ethics and hardly at all with conduct."

"Rosalia is dressed in raven clothes forty years too old for her, so that she seems to be in mourning for her life."

"Black and white are the most ravishing colors of all in film."