quotations

He refers to them often in conversation: bits of poetry, quotations, scenes from films.

I put free speech in quotations because we’re not talking about the kind of free speech people fight and die for under dictatorships or theocracies.

I, too, am a collector of quotations, and after joking that newspaper stories should have epigraphs, I suggest one, from Wallace Stegner, that seems apropos to our conversation about Cohn: Present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours.

Sometime late last week, spray-paint-wielding intruders turned the pink walls of this seven-bedroom mansion into a helter-skelter canvas of pop art, obscure quotations and political insinuations — the third hillside home in Los Angeles to be defaced in recent days.

I’ll spare you any more lyrical quotations except to point out that the best Perry can do in “Artificial,” which wants to make some kind of point about the encroachments of technology, is to describe herself as “a prisoner in your prison.”