“a coherent worldview was secondary to shared revulsions. A market had opened up for illiberal transgressions, no matter how banal and empty.”

“She was only 56. There is wonder that so much of her journalism is in the world – and that who she was shines through each sentence of it – but there is also that sharper sadness: she had so much more to write.”

“What’s ‘essential,’ anyway? Decongestants, or the acceptance that someday everything, even a business that you never even cared about, will cease to exist?”

“Some of his comedy was harrowing, including parts of ‘The Dancing Towers”—closer to ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ than to ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’”

“He even created a full musical episode, ‘The Dancing Towers’ (1956), featuring a star dancer who can’t stop eating. Was he confessing his own troubles? Psychoanalysis licensed his candor, but the audience didn’t always join him on the couch.

“Amid parodies and marital sketches, he’d deliver a drunkard’s solo rant, or play a teetotaller undone by a single drink. His face could collapse in shame, his jaw sliding sideways; neither Goya nor Ensor painted despair more vividly.