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Quotes by Critic
"Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change."
34
"And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals."
34
"One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs."
34
"Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without."
34
"If I were less than honest as a critic, I think people would spot that right away, and it would destroy my credibility."
34
"We seem to be a long way off from the kind of Fascism which we behold in Italy today, but we are not so far from the kind of Fascism which Mussolini preached in Italy before he assumed power, and we are slowly approaching the conditions which made Fascism there possible."
34
"That's probably when I get the most angry at American movies, when they just so cynically manipulate the audience without even trying to give a good story."
34
"I think in conventional magazine wisdom, you need to have a redesign every decade or so."
34
"To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before."
34
"It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality."
34
"I'm a writer. Now I've started to be on television. I have a big mouth. And I have good TV teeth, they say."
34
"I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller."
34
"It is guaranteed to put all teeth on edge, including George Washington's, wherever they might be."
34
"As long as there is rape... there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become. You are not going to live in the world you want to live in."
34
"The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation."
34
"When the government picked companies and gave them monopoly rights to frequencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, it was picking the winners of the competition; it wasn't setting the terms of the competition."
34
"Living simply makes loving simple."
34
"I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me."
34
"The reason that conservative talk radio works is because there is an audience for it."
34
"For when we talk about the spreading power and influence of globalization, aren't we really referring to the spreading economic and military might of the US?"
34
"What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way, which would clear the way for something better to come along."
34
"Some pacifists have carried the sound idea of the prime importance of security too far, to the point of declaring that any consideration of disarmament is superfluous and pointless as long as eternal peace has not been attained."
34
"When the government allocates monopoly rights to frequency, and there are only a handful in each community, it's picking the winners in the competition."
34
"Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer."
34
"The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth."
34
"Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives."
34
"Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do."
34
"Time and time again when I talk to individuals about approaching love with will and intentionality, I hear the fear expressed that this will bring an end to romance. This is simply not so. Approaching romantic love from foundation of care, knowledge, and respect actually intensifies romance."
34
"The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy."
34
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