"It is billiards with balls that won't hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition."
Chap. 1, Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, p. 7

"These scholars are like people who despise—I mean big-time, long-term despise—their spouses or jobs, but won't split up or quit. Critical complaint seems long ago to have degenerated into plain old whining. The important question about U.S. television is no longer whether there are some truly nasty problems involved in Americans' relation to television but rather what might possibly be done about them. On this question pop critics and scholars are resoundingly mute."
Chap. 2, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, p. 29

"But it is not I the spy who have crept inside television's boundaries. It is vice versa. Television, even the mundane little businesses of its...