Quotable Quotes: The New Yorker (01-04-10)

• If you want to see Hollywood at the last gasp of its otherworldliness, consult the photograph of [Grace] Kelly and her fellow presenter, Audrey Hepburn, backstage at the Academy Awards in 1956 ... Both are in profile, gazing in expectation, and both wear white gloves. They could be at their first Communion.

• The right-wing hippie is a rare bird.

• He led with an epigram attributed to Margaret Thatcher: 'The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.'

• For people who think that Vampire Weekend is making music that's inauthentic to us, the question is 'What is authentic to us?' Is it the Rolling Stones - some version of black Southern music? There are probably a lot better reasons why you could say we're not good.

• It's a mixed-use facility: retail space, low-rent housing, luxury apartments, and an area set aside for making steel.

• The [Grace] Kelly effect is not unlike the James Dean effect ... whereby a few brief hours of screen time continue unquenchably to burn.

• To some, Whole Foods is Whole Paycheck, an overpriced luxury for yuppie gastronomes and fussy label-readers.

• [N]othing can undo the movies that we are led to in our youth, or the skein of impressions that they leave.

• During a famous exchange with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock argued that 'if sex is too blatant or too obvious, there's no suspense. You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We're after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they're in the bedroom.'