Columnists From The United States

"[I]t's guilty of the very thing that makes kids hate history as a subject when it's taught badly: The Da Vinci Code makes the past feel like a dull, grainy, faraway thing, instead of something vibrant and alive."

"Children of Men is a solemn, haunting picture, but it's also a thrilling one, partly because of the sheer bravado with which it's made. It left me feeling more fortified than drained. [Director Alfonso] Cuarón, the most openhearted of directors, prefers to give rather than take away."

"This is a sturdy little cop thriller, and even when it stretches the bounds of plausibility, you go with it, partly because you believe -- almost against your better judgment -- in what the characters are doing."

"Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of [director Steven] Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive."

"I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap."

"Batman Begins leaks existential phoniness from the first frame."

"While 9 Songs is sexually explicit in the basic sense, its directness is what's most fascinating, and ultimately most moving, about it."

"This film Phantom takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat."

"Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion."

"Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic."

"I can't remember ever feeling so glad that a movie was finally over. [Director George] Lucas may have held my imagination hostage for two hours, but reclaiming it afterward wasn't hard at all."

"Who would have thought that [director] Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right."

"It's a movie barely fit for a cretin, much less a King. ... If you hear a door slam in the theater, you'll know that Elvis has left the building -- in disgust."

"It's mournful and troubling in a way that goes beyond ordinary movie manipulation. It burns clean."

"[Director James] Cameron manhandles the real story, scavenging it for his own puny narrative purposes. It's a film made with boorish confidence and zero sensitivity, big and dumb and hulking."

"Women's desire is a mysterious, feral thing, and if you think you've got it figured out because you've looked at a few Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, you're not even close."

"It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes."

"Everything about Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, from its toy-box colors to its superb, hyper-animated Danny Elfman score to the butch-waxed hairdo and wooden-puppet walk of its star and mastermind is pure pleasure."

"You can talk film theory till you're blue in the face, but in the end, the thing that may haunt you most about a movie is a pair of eyes."

"Isn't it really, really offensive that our president is simply not telling us the truth about what's happening in Iraq? For me, that was one of the most offensive things about the entire convention. There was no truth-telling there. It was all a complete masquerade. Both about Iraq and about the domestic economy... The problem is not that the people think the Democratic Party is not sufficiently hawkish; it's the problem that they are not sufficiently bold and sufficiently visionary. They need to go back to Bobby Kennedy and 1968. That was the last time that a Democrat truly inspired red states and blue states and everybody and the millions of people out there."

"Ariana Huffington is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good decision."

"I think a lot of people who would say they are atheists, when you really scratch the surface, they have a sense of spirituality or mysticism or wonder of the mystery of life, but they don’t believe in a particular creed. For me, really, what matters is to have that sense that there is something amazing and mysterious about life; that we haven’t figured it all out and the journey of exploring it is fascinating"

"Tap into your creativity – even if it isn’t a part of your job. It’s one of the things that our culture has suppressed. Every child is creative; they sing, they draw. But then at some point if we can’t make a living out of our ‘creative love’, we drop it. But in fact it’s great to maintain in some way"

"When I am not joyful, I look at what happened. I don’t mean joyful as in there are no challenges, problems etc., I mean when I’m not like ‘Hey this is great, I’m blessed, I’m doing something I love, I’m grateful’ – when I don’t have that feeling, I know that I’m off; I need to course correct"

"I want to look at how we can build a path forward for our lives, which is more sustainable and less fueled by burnouts, sleep deprivation, exhaustion"

"The time-famine we are talking about is really what drains us, because it means we are not here. We are somewhere else with our minds"

"I started life so self-judgmental. I call the voice in my head the ‘obnoxious roommate’; always putting me down, telling me I’m not good enough. And learning to actually deal with that voice, with a sense of humor – maybe getting it to dance with you – in order to evict it from my head. Then we are much more present"

"My mother would constantly say to me: ‘Don’t miss the moment’, because really that is all we have. And so often our minds take us to the future, either worrying about the future or judging our past"

"I’m asking people to realize that whatever our job in the world is, whatever our dreams are, we are bigger than that. If we can find that, who we really are and live from that place, life is truly amazing no matter what the challenges and the obstacles are"

"We need a third metric of success, which include our health and our being, first of all, because if we sacrifice that, what do we have? And our capacity to tap into our own wisdom, our own sense of wonder at the beauty of life that we so often miss, and our capacity to give, and to be kind"

"By conventional definition of success, which means two metrics: money and power, I was successful. By any sane definition of success, I was not successful if I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of my office"

"Two years after launching The Huffington Post I was exhausted, burnt out. The feeling many of us have. I collapsed from exhaustion and on the way down I hit my head on the desk, broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. And it started me on this journey of questioning what success is"

"Don't forget: our media culture failed to serve the public interest by missing (with a few honourable exceptions) the two biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the Iraq war and the financial melt­down. We've had far too many autopsies and not enough biopsies."

"When your house is burning down, you don't worry about the remodeling."

"Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife."

"Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men."

"The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway."

"America is a country ready to be taken—in fact, longing to be taken—by political leaders ready to restore democracy and trust to the political process."

"A baby is shown sitting on the floor. He appears to be about a year and a half old. Incidentally, he is a very plain baby. Strewn about him on the floor are the toys that he has been playing with. There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, a bell and a pair of roller-skates. Evidently, the candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller-skates in the possession of such a small child. The man who drew that picture had evidently never furnished playthings for a small child. I can imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew and spin and hit himself in the face with. They could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable. Of all the toys arranged before the child, the roller-skates are the most logical. … That is my great trouble in taking tests and examinations of any kind. I always want to argue with the examiner, because the examiner is always so obviously wrong."

"The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than "The doctor will see you now." I am willing to concede something to the phrase "Have you anything to say before the current is turned on?" That may be worse for the moment, but it doesn't last so long. For continued, unmitigating depression, I know nothing to equal "The doctor will see you now." But I'm not narrow-minded about it. I'm willing to consider other possibilities."

"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."

"Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted."

"Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment."

"I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine."

"Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony."

"So who's in a hurry?"

"There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know."

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

"The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."

"A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated."