Lee Siegel Quotes

#1. Television has to reflect back to you your own sense of security. It also has to mirror your sense of your own decency and your own limitations.

Lee Siegel

#2. All love songs, no matter how eloquent or crude, ornamented or plain, in whatever language they are sung, say essentially the same thing. All love stories have but one meaning.

Lee Siegel

#3. The counterculture had sought to practice the idea that creative personal expression was the essence of an authentic existence. The WELL, drawing strength from the Internet culture's belief that the market contains all values, put personal expression up for sale.

Lee Siegel

#4. Anonymity is a universal convention of the blogosphere, and the wicked expedience is that you can speak without consequences.

Lee Siegel

#5. It's okay, you can do it. Because I am playing with myself as I write this, I hope you're doing the same as you read it. Otherwise there's not much point. Go ahead. Don't be shy or modest, prudish or self-conscious. That's it. It feels nice, doesn't it?

Lee Siegel

#6. I react very badly when mediocrity throws a tantrum of entitlement.

Lee Siegel

#7. 'Hotel Rwanda' is an American product, not a Rwandan one, made primarily for American audiences.

Lee Siegel

#8. The WELLians were learning how to turn their private experiences into a public commodity.

Lee Siegel

#9. Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities that come from being who you are. I think that is why the blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self.

Lee Siegel

#10. I love the idea of the amateur - that's what popular culture is all about. But what the Internet's doing is professionalizing everyone's amateuristic impulses.

Lee Siegel

#11. The terrorist threat is so cloudy, faceless, and vague, so manipulable by political purposes, so definitely present but indefinitely manifested, that it sometimes feels interchangeable with everyday dread itself.

Lee Siegel

#12. In urban America, you do not so much meet a romantic partner as inherit the product of someone else's romantic crimes.

Lee Siegel

#13. It became inevitable that television would address life's mundane problems because television itself is so mundane, part of the ordinary flow of time the way those problems are.

Lee Siegel

#14. Mandel, who died in 1995, had mastered the art of packaging his interiority, an innovation that would become the driving engine behind Web culture.

Lee Siegel

#15. Ever since the romantic comedy-drama 'She's Gotta Have It' antagonized black women and black men in 1986, Spike Lee's films have enjoyed the outrage of various groups.

Lee Siegel

#16. Instead of books, art, theatre, and music being consigned to specialized niches, we might have a criticism that better reflects the eclecticism of our time, a criticism that takes in various arts all at once.

Lee Siegel

#17. Every 'Oprah Winfrey Show' has about it the aura of Oprah's own life, just as the rituals and sacraments of a religion are suffused with the life of the religion's founder. Above the testimony of Oprah's guests hovers what viewers know about Oprah's experience.

Lee Siegel

#18. I am too childlike to be immature.

Lee Siegel

#19. Everything, taboo and familiar, occurs on the same screen.

Lee Siegel

#20. In 1986, human nature in America started to change. That year, 'The Oprah Winfrey Show,' based in Chicago, became nationally syndicated, and the country entered the beginning stages of a quiet cultural revolution.

Lee Siegel

#21. The sitcom's traditional role has been to comfort the viewer who feels burdened by the unreality of American expectations.

Lee Siegel

#22. Oprah's aspiration to inspire her audience with hope - elaborated on her TV show, in her magazine, and on her website - is hardly ignoble.

Lee Siegel

#23. They were learning how to perform their privacy.

Lee Siegel

#24. I have a confession to make. For years, I earned a living - or a sort of living - writing negative book reviews.

Lee Siegel

#25. I love the Internet; I'm on it all the time.

Lee Siegel

#26. Every man is a hero to his alias.

Lee Siegel

#27. The Web critic relies on his or her readers for attentiveness and approval.

Lee Siegel

#28. A single week of Oprah takes you from bondage to all the violent terrors of life, to escape through vicarious encounters with celebrity, to visions of charity and hope, to hard resolve, to redemption and moral renovation.

Lee Siegel