Phillip Ressler

“For a stand-up comic, a minute on TV without a laugh was death. And Carson was adamant about the formula. He had recently stopped by the Improv to see Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman perform and had pronounced both of them “not ready,” telling Budd Friedman, “They’re funny, but they don’t have six minutes.” By”
― William Knoedelseder, I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and high times in stand-up comedy's golden era

“We’ve made a devil’s pact, swapping convenience and efficiency for an ever-increasing tyranny of information and choice.”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

“Recently, an internationally renowned writer for children commented about the Council [on Interracial Books for Children, Inc.] to me: “Of course, we should all be more tender and understanding toward the aged and we should work to shrive ourselves of racism and sexism, but when you impose guidelines like theirs on writing, you’re strangling the imagination. And that means that you’re limiting the ability of children to imagine. If all books for them were ‘cleansed’ according to these criteria, it would be the equivalent of giving them nothing to eat but white bread.”
“To write according to such guidelines,” this story teller continued, “is to take the life out of what you do. Also the complexity, the ambivalence. And thereby the young reader gets no real sense of the wonders and terrors and unpredictabilities of living. Paradoxically, censors like the council clamor for ‘truth’ but are actually working to flatten children’s reading experiences into the most misleading, simplistic kinds of untruth.”

("Any Writer Who Follows Anyone Else's Guidelines Ought to Be in Advertising" (1977), from Beyond Fact: Nonfiction for Children and Young People, 1982)”
― Nat Hentoff

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is hitched to everything else in the universe.”70”
― Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream