Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word "sophisticate" means, very simply, "obscene." A sophisticated... story is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a "sophisticate" means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.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 »
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 »