Dave Itzkoff

“To reach a mass audience, you have to offer more than just hostility.”

“Where would heist movies be without the Big Score - that payoff so irresistible it can lure the most jaded desperado out of hiding?”

“Everybody's been in harsh relationships.”

“Often, as an interviewer, particularly when you're talking to highly visible people, celebrities, and it's known that negative things have happened, they don't want to talk about it, or you have to really work up to it. You have to carefully construct the conversation so that they feel open enough to discuss some of those things with you.”

“Where nationally televised news had been a once-nightly ritual, it has since grown into a 24-hour-a-day habit, available on channels devoted entirely and ceaselessly to its dissemination.”

“As an ardent supporter of the Nietzschean conception of the eternal recurrence, I firmly believe that one cannot validate the totality of a life unless one accepts and embraces all the experiences that comprise it. That said, I sometimes wish I'd gone to film school.”

“It is a fundamental impossibility to have a magazine that is anarchic and yet formulaic. Those can't coincide.”

“I will say I highly recommend, if you want to write a book also, have a child in the midst of that process because it will really force you to organize your time.”

“There's always going to be the market for people who are known to have led wild and crazy lives.”

“One of the first times I wrote about Robin Williams for 'The New York Times,' I interviewed him for a feature about 'World's Greatest Dad,' a dark comedy he starred in for his friend, the writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait.”

“Certainly, no studio is going to put its money and its muscle behind something that they don't think they can spin five or six movies out of and build a whole kind of imaginary universe from anymore, I think.”

“How would Jonathan Lethem have obtained such a stellar endorsement for 'The Fortress of Solitude' from Michael Chabon, if not for the years they spent ghostwriting 'MAD' magazine fold-ins together?”

“It's a slippery slope when you make the argument that hip hop is only a black person's art. Certainly, its origins are in that community, but if you want it to endure as an art form you have to let other people have their way with it.”

“Are you ready to have your mind blown? Sometimes Ron Howard uses swear words.”

“I can't anticipate what's going to happen to me next, but I'd like to think that I'm going to lead a life that's not really memoir-worthy, and that would be fine!”

“Robin Williams was a cultural hero of mine, and in the encounters and interactions I was able to share with him, he was always gentle and generous, humane and thoughtful and hilarious.”

“That's all it takes in life to win a woman over - a good gimmick.”

“When you write a roman a clef, there is a tendency on the part of the reader to wonder how much of this is true, how much invented.”

“The problem isn't getting your hands on a press pass - it's acquiring one of those wide-brimmed fedora hats in which to keep your press pass.”

“Benzino has a long, credible history as a rapper and as a producer.”