Lee Siegel Quotes & Sayings

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

I'm writing a book on magic", I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No", I answer: "Conjuring tricks, not real magic". Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic. — Lee Siegel

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

'Hotel Rwanda' is an American product, not a Rwandan one, made primarily for American audiences. — Lee Siegel

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

I love the Internet; I'm on it all the time. — Lee Siegel

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

Every man is a hero to his alias. — Lee Siegel

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

Everything, taboo and familiar, occurs on the same screen. — Lee Siegel

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

They were learning how to perform their privacy. — Lee Siegel

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

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

Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read. — Lee Siegel

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

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

Anonymity is a universal convention of the blogosphere, and the wicked expedience is that you can speak without consequences. — Lee Siegel

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

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

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

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

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

The WELLians were learning how to turn their private experiences into a public commodity. — Lee Siegel

I react very badly when mediocrity throws a tantrum of entitlement. — Lee Siegel

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

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

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

The Web critic relies on his or her readers for attentiveness and approval. — Lee Siegel

I am too childlike to be immature. — Lee Siegel

The assimilation of taboo images to the everyday language of doing business produces a strange effect. It domesticates the taboo while at the same time making the everyday transactional world more porous, more open to the forbidden. The wolf of unbridled appetite slips into everyday convention in the sheep's clothing of commercial language. — Lee Siegel

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