Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they ...are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we d...o want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake ... but absolut...e personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many wr...iters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at... least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water..., made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary ...way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devo...te more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders i...t, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »