I Wear The Black Hat: Grappling With Villains Quotes
"I care about strangers when they’re abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they’re literally in front of me."
"Being emotionally fragile is an important part of being a successful critic; it’s an integral element to being engaged with mainstream art."
"Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliché misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives."
"It was possible for Miami Vice to paint a narcotics dealer as engaging, but never as moral."
"It’s assumed that whoever the con man swindles is partially at fault, because you can’t con an honest man."
"The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least."
"We need our memory to correspond with reality, so they establish a reality that’s new."
"It’s entirely possible (and perhaps even probable) that Machiavelli was being sarcastic."
"My personality had calcified and emancipated itself from taste."
"What matters to me is why Machiavelli’s connotation will always, always be pejorative, no matter how much unconventional wisdom suggests the opposite."
"It’s not about a salary, it’s all about reality."
"You have to take it seriously and unseriously at the same time."
"They were bad guys on purpose, so they were able to define their own rules."
"The deeper motives that drive you can only be questioned by those who know you exceptionally well, and (most of the time) not even by them."
"If you act nice, you’re nice. That’s the whole equation."
"What mattered was that this joke was not cognizant (or even interested) in any social mores."
"They saw it as straightforward entertainment. Who even cared if it was real or fake?"
"The only positive memory of his career is that he was popular."
"The expectation for those who cover modern television is that they will consistently interpret the experience of TV in radical, personal ways."
"Sometimes you just need to write something to fill a space that must be filled, and sometimes that filler makes no sense when dissected critically."
"The machinations of politics are mostly fake; they are performed and constructed for our psychological benefit with little tangible impact."
"The entire U.S. music industry is less than $20 billion. So how can one website be responsible for this amount of damage?"
"He acts like a man who finds his own obesity hilarious."
"The future makes the rules, so there's no point in being mad when the future wins."
"It's easier to just embrace Dotcom's viewpoint, even if it's self-serving and unfair."
"No one argues that she's the counterintuitive hero. She does not deserve sympathy. Yet she still generates empathy."
"Pleasure as such has never attracted me. It must be spiced by moral satisfaction."
"I see all of Crowley’s worst qualities in myself. But none of the good ones."
"It’s probably not surprising that my personal interest in Crowley was — for many years — exclusively tied to his accidental relationship with heavy rock music."
"The main thing Aleister Crowley did was be himself, which is why he was so good at it."
"I want to return to the moment before we knew who Loughner was; I want to reopen the window of time when the center of the story was Palin."
"It’s like carrying a gun into a maternity ward; it means your superficial sympathies fall with the opposite of whatever you were taught to believe."
"I began rooting for Sarah Palin. I wanted all the bozos on my Twitter feed to be wrong."
"I have no choice but to write about Adolf Hitler, despite the fact that writing about Hitler is a terrible idea."
"Hitler cared very, very much about many perverse things. He cared about the supremacy of Germany."