"No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes."

"We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail."

"Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether."

"It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths."

"Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits."

"It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits."