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Quotes by Critic
"You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world."
72
"When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest."
72
"Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps."
67
"Everyone is looking for the sure thing. They are looking to hedge their bet. They think the way to do that is to go with a proven quantity, a remake of something you have already seen. That is their mindset."
67
"You can't believe Russell Crowe is the same actor who won an Oscar one year ago for Gladiator."
64
"A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop."
63
"When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day."
63
"Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred."
63
"Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer."
62
"There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our work to be recognized, but that is not the reason we write. We do not write because we must; we always have a choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community."
62
"I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist."
62
"To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead."
62
"Michael Taylor is not being executed for homicide. Michael Taylor is being executed for raping a white female."
61
"I do my best not to have any expectations when I go into a movie because it's not fair."
61
"If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem."
Body,
61
"A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one."
60
"Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding."
60
"In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal."
60
"Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking."
60
"He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies."
60
"Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them."
Old,
60
"The "Western" is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself."
59
"If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying."
59
"Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book."
59
"We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background."
58
"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself."
58
"We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love."
58
"The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript."
Man,
57
"Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers."
57
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