Pop Culture Critique Quotes

Our mantra is that 90 percent of all television is bad, and ten percent has never been better. We make fun of that 90 percent.

Rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, in order to provide articles for people who can't read.

Unless we're talking about old-school, witchcraft-trial violence, can we please phase out the phrase 'girl crush?' While we're at it, if we can axe 'like, total girl crush' unless Total Girl Crush is the name of a fizzy soft drink, in which case I'll take two, thank you.

A friend of mine had this great theory about the Teletubbies, that it's preparing us for being mindless. And getting us ready for living in an underground world. That's why the scenery is so flat.

I'm not interested, Larry, in being a perfect, plastic pop singer that looks great in bikinis and is on the cover of every magazine. I'm more interested in helping my fans to love who they are, and helping them to reject prejudice and reject those things that they're taught from society to not like themselves, to feel like freaks, that they're not wanted.

I'm on 'Two and a Half Men,' and I don't want to be on it. Please stop watching it, and filling your head with filth.

What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant.

American pop culture is perpetually in adolescent mode. The notions of what it takes to be a man, as depicted in pop culture, are very superficial, one-dimensional, and adolescent.

People don't analyze Britney Spears' lyrics 'cause they're so obvious, you know? And her image is so kind of blah and mainstream that who really wants to read between the lines, because it's all so out there in front of you and boring and white bread.

Wonder Woman isn't even American; she's an Amazon princess.

Now that we're poisoned with the culture of superheroes, I think it's important to laugh about it.

I hate reality TV, because it's so bullshit.

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.

We don't want to make little pop culture ephemera or confections, that sort of thing, and so 'ParaNorman' like 'Coraline' has something meaningful to say.

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books, or write opinion pieces about what they think of Neil Young, or why they quit watching ER or whatever. And because of that, I think there's a lot of people who write about my books with the premise of, "Why this guy? Why not me?"

In the world of late-night comics, Letterman made us feel any hometown boy from Indianapolis could poke fun at celebrities and politicians and do it right to their faces.

It's the refuge for the mentally deficient. It's made by dull people for dull people.

I still go to the conventions, and I like to hear the point of view of people today. I'm a little afraid they're being brainwashed by this new pop-culture. I think it's not really elevating our lives like it did in the good old days of Hollywood, where you had a happy ending. They used to criticize happy endings, but really, what's the point of going to a film if you have to come out hating your fellow man?

The song is based on a lot of observation and a lot of speculation. But in sort of a pointed way its kind of about Madonna...I think it was a particular time where I was being bombarded with her image on TV and in magazines and her whole schtick kind of speaks to me in that way...like she's going through some sort of problem. It seems she's getting a bit desperate.