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Quotes by Critic
"The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital."
38
"The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much."
38
"The criteria, for me, is movie star. It's Hollywood. Not Somalia."
38
"When people say 'love to hate', they actually mean 'love to be appalled by' - if they truly hated them, they'd never repeat a catch phrase."
38
"Apparently we love our own cell phones but we hate everyone else's."
38
"It's funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that's causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it's in the Bush Administration."
38
"We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts."
38
"The most deadly fruit is borne by the hatred which one grafts on an extinguished friendship."
38
"The men in my life have always been the folks who are wary of using the word 'love' lightly. They are wary because they believe women make too much of love. And they know that what we think love means is not always what they believe it means. Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word 'love' is the source of our difficulty in loving. If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying."
38
"Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius."
38
"The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform."
37
"What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude."
37
"The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable."
37
"What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era."
37
"I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not."
37
"If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit."
37
"People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work."
37
"The last person to stand still and repeat himself was Walt Disney. He refused to repeat himself. So to think that he'd be making the same kind of film in the year 2001 that he made in 1941 is absurd."
37
"The Holy Bible is an abyss. It is impossible to explain how profound it is, impossible to explain how simple it is."
37
"The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism."
37
"The Rockwell magazine cover was more a part of the American reality than a record of it."
37
"The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent."
37
"So the system we have in radio and television today is the direct result of government policies that have been made in our name, in the name of the people, on our behalf, but without our informed consent."
37
"In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary."
37
"It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother."
37
"For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual."
37
"To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished."
37
"Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were."
37
"Six hours a day I lived under school discipline in active intercourse with people none of whom were known to those at home, and the other hours of the twenty-four I spent at home, or with relatives of the people at home, none of whom were known to anybody at school."
37
"The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness."
37
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