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From the Mystery Lovers Book of Quotations


  • Liberal principles are all very fine as long as they leave you with something to have principles about. -- Jack Higgins

  • Sweep everything under the rug for long enough, and you have to move right out of the house. -- Rachel Ingalls

  • It's hard to live a reputation down. Especially when your actions live up to it. -- Michael Z. Lewin

  • A prompt man is a lonely man. - Elmore Leonard

  • You know who casts the first stone? The guiltiest bastard in the crowd. -- William McIlvanney

  • Life is the process of finding out, too late, everything that should have been obvious to you at the time. -- John D. MacDonald, "The Only Girl in the Game"

  • We gave her everything. But it wasn't what she wanted. -- Ross MacDonald, "The Underground Man"

  • Sanity is sometimes a matter of going on, outwardly, as if everything is all right. -- Mary McMullen, "Prudence Be Damned"

  • People without brains are always dangerous. -- A.E.W. Mason, "The House of the Arrow"

  • Everybody needs a little improbability in their life. -- Reginal Hill, "Deadheads"

Read This

Throwback

Do you wish that you could see "Three Days of the Condor" for the first time again? Do you miss really well-written, well-plotted, well-directed films that are interesting because they are about adult situations that do not center on bad language or sex?

Go see "Michael Clayton."

It's a major tour de force for Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack and, yes, even the regrettably political George Clooney.

It's the best movie we've seen this year. Maybe IN years.

We are late on this one; it probably won't play for many more weeks. Go see it before it is gone from the big screen.

Posted on Sunday, November 11, 2007 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

It's Wrong. Just Wrong.

I think the choice of Daniel Craig to play James Bond is wrong. I'm not having any of it.

James Bond is supposed to be handsome. Craig isn't. He was well suited to play the psychotic killer son of Paul Newman in "Road to Perdition." But smooth, irresistable lady killer James Bond? It stretches the imagination too, too far.

There's only one way I can accept Daniel Craig as James Bond, and that is if they hire equally unattractive actresses to play the Bond girls opposite him. Then I could tell myself they were just going for reality.

Reality ... in the James Bond franchise.

Right.

It's wrong. Just wrong!

Posted on Saturday, October 15, 2005 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Favorite Movies

Appropos of nothing, I've been compiling a list lately of my favorite movies. Here it is so far.

  • Moonstruck
  • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
  • Return to Me
  • The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
  • Pillow Talk
  • Ishtar
  • You've Got Mail
  • Truly, Madly, Deeply
  • Lover Come Back
  • Cheyenne Social Club
  • The Women
  • Notting Hill
  • Bachelor Apartment
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles (Dudley Moore/Peter Cook)
  • Three Days of the Condor
  • The Electric Horseman
  • The Thin Man (every one in the series)
  • The Sting
  • It's a Wonderful Life
  • My Man Godfrey
  • A Christmas Story
  • Grosse Point Blank
  • Barbershop
  • Godfather I & II
  • Home Alone
  • Diner
  • Kings of Comedy
  • Life with Father
  • Tin Men
  • Enchanted April
  • Love Actually
  • The Morning After
  • The Fabulous Baker Boys
  • Rear Window
  • Into the Night
  • The Glenn Miller Story
  • Dave
  • Harvey
  • A Fish Called Wanda
  • Life of Brian
  • The Long Kiss Goodnight
  • True Lies
  • Spellbound

Posted on Sunday, December 05, 2004 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Wishful Media Thinking

"An editorial in Wednesday's Chronicle carelessly referred to Sen. John Kerry in one reference as 'President Kerry.' The Chronicle regrets the error."--correction, Houston Chronicle, July 7

This gem brought to you by Taranto of the Wall Street Journal:

On Sept. 11, 2001, America suffered the deadliest attack ever by a foreign enemy on its own soil. Fanatical Muslim terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes, crashing two of them into the World Trade center and a third into the Pentagon. The trade center was destroyed, the Pentagon badly damaged. A fourth plane, which might have been bound for the Capitol, crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania after passengers overpowered the hijackers. Some 3,000 people perished that day, and America has been at war ever since.

Nearly three years later, a presidential campaign is under way. One of the wonders of American democracy is that elections have always gone on as usual during wartime--even in 1864 during the Civil War and 1944 during World War II. The president has to defend his record to the voters even as he is fighting the country's enemies--and so it should be.

So, what is John Kerry's argument for turning President Bush and Vice President Cheney out of office and replacing them with Kerry and John Edwards? Here is what he had to say yesterday: "We've got better vision, better ideas, real plans. We've got a better sense of what's happening to America--and we've got better hair."

Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 | | TrackBack (0)

Thinking of Breeding Your Pet?

The Harp Is a Beautiful Instrument of Torture


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Favorite Quotes


  • The self-delusion of liberalism is bottomless. It blithely celebrates the inane though no less destructive nihilism of Woodstock while treating as nihilistic traitors serious, property-holding, taxpaying citizens who protest a statist takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy. - George Neumayr

  • You can tell the Democrats are in trouble when a naïve hockey mom from Alaska can appear out of nowhere and wrestle the entire Democratic Party to the ground. - Christopher Chantrill

  • ...Western hand-wringers, the great progressive liberals of the Western world, would rather wring their hands, or like Darfur, hold some ... interpretive dance event to save Darfur every week for the next thirty years. The uselessness of liberal outrage is one of the great constants of the modern world. --Mark Steyn

  • "America, not Europe, is now the sanctuary of culture; civilization's very existence depends upon America, upon the actuality of American life, and not the ideals of the American Dream. To criticize the actuality upon which all hope depends thus becomes a criticism of hope itself." -- Delmore Schwartz, 1958

  • "I've got nothing to do and I'm doing it tomorrow." --Elaine Stritch

  • "...He is, like all great funny men, inconsolable." --John Lahr describing a famous comedian

  • In taking our self-examining ethos to these extremes, we have lost a kind of wisdom, wisdom that acknowledges the complexity of human life but can move through it to find the simple truth again. While assessing the intricate failings of our moral history, many of us have lost sight of the simple truth that the system that shapes us is, in fact, a great one, that it has moved us inexorably to do better and that it's well worth defending against every aggressor and certainly against as shabby and vicious an aggressor as we face today. -- Andrew Klavan

  • The elites in Washington, D.C., New York City and the United Nations seem to have plotted a journey to lead America into the New World Order where a cosmopolitan global citizen is no more connected to his country than a sociopath to his fellow man. -- Dimitri Vassilaros

  • "Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark." --Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr, 1983-2005

  • Anything that doesn’t show Americans as stupid, selfish, warmongering, religious bigots, half of them living in pampered luxury in garish purpose-built Italianate mansions, the other half downtrodden in the ghetto by Halliburton stock-owning fat-cats, isn’t going to make it to the front pages or the Ten O’Clock News. --Gerard Baker

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In Their Own Words: Democrats on W.M.D.

  • Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., December 1998: "Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
  • Robert Einhorn, Clinton assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, March 2002: "How close is the peril of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors (albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate and limited in size). Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously -- and to threaten U.S. territory with such weapons delivered by nonconventional means, such as commercial shipping containers. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner."
  • Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, February 1998: "He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has 10 times since 1983."
  • ...without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again... [It's} hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country’s salvation.--New York Times Editorial Board
  • Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction. Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.--Ted Kennedy & Robert Byrd in 2002
  • I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force—if necessary—to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.--John Kerry in 2002
  • Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.--Al Gore in 2002
  • We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.--Al Gore in 2002
  • In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.--Sen. Hillary Clinton
  • Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.--Nancy Pelosi