"It's very difficult for me to go to theatres these days. Also, when I did go a few years ago, the nature of the audience, the noise - it's not taken seriously. And it hurts. I mean comedies too. There's an attitude, there are phones going off, people talking. It's crazy."

- Martin Scorsese

“It is a well-known fact that the 'Close the door' button in most elevators is a totally dysfunctional [sic] placebo, which is placed there just to give the individuals the impression that they are somehow participating, contributing to the speed of the'elevator journey - when we push this button, the door closes in exactly the same time as when we just pressed the floor button without 'speeding up' the process by pressing also the ‘Close the door' button. This extreme and clear case of fake participation is an appropriate metaphor of the participation of individuals in our 'postmodern' political process."

- Zizek

From a letter by Raymond Chandler, 1939: "I think [my wife] agrees with me that the percentage of phonies in the population is increasing...I like people with manners, grace, some social intuition, an education slightly above the Reader's Digest fan, people whose pride of living does not express itself in their kitchen gadgets and their automobiles."

“And what is all this life but a kind of comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another's disguises and act their respective parts, till the property-man brings them back to the attiring house...Thus are all things represented by counterfeit, and yet without this there was no living."

- Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

Patti Smith on Andy Warhol's death: "I slipped outside into the night.  The snow had ceased falling and it seemed like the whole of the city, in remembrance of Andy, had been covered in an undisturbed layer of snow - white and fleeting as Warhol's  hair."