Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Whatever is popular deserves attention.

People constantly make pop-culture references. That's why it's called popular culture, because people are aware of it and reference it constantly.

It's just amazing to do something that's part of a pop culture phenomenon.

I don't want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven't studied cinema can't appreciate it. By the same token, I don't want to be the guy who's making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater.

Hollywood likes to boast that it can elevate the national conscience.

The best shows succeed because they tap into a national conversation.

The No. 1 quote critics give me is, 'Thom, your work is irrelevant.' Now, that's a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here's the point: My art is relevant because it's relevant to 10 million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture.

The Oscars are about the dynamics of that moment, of that season. It reflects what's been going on in the world every year through the movies. And a lot of times, what's popular at the movies is popular because of what's going on in the world at that moment.

Politics is pop. Our job as comedians - especially me, as a late-night talk show, which is a broader audience - is to amplify what we think America is thinking.

When a show has gotten as much attention as this one, everyone wants to join in with something to say.

Popular sings are the only art form that describes the temper of the times.

The value of kitsch exists in its novelty and in its connotations to more legitimate counterparts.

Cinema and cricket are two professions in this country that people have an opinion on.

'Hairspray' has never been irrelevant, which is, in some ways, heartbreaking.

It's hard to say what iconically will hit, resonate and stay with people.

That's the definition of popularity. Something that literally resonates with many, many people.

Marvel has always been to a large extent the world around us. It has to be evocative of the world around us, the feelings people are feeling. You take real-world concerns and you put a Marvel face on it.

Ain't it funny what people say? Ain't it funny what people write?

Pointed axioms and acute replies fly loose about the world, and are assigned successively to those whom it may be the fashion to celebrate.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.

Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic.

People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that's the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick.

On reflection, some things do super well because they hit with the time. Some things do super well because they are able to activate a kind of echo chamber or bandwagon or cascade - they didn't particularly hit with the time. Some things are just too astonishingly good to not hit the top. Those three explanations, with respect to the Star Wars phenomenon, seem to me all to pass the plausibility test, and to explore them, with respect to Star Wars, I think casts light not just on the saga of our time, but also on everything about our culture.