top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Critic
"I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter."
12
"The Rockwell magazine cover was more a part of the American reality than a record of it."
11
"Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion."
11
"The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster."
11
"We all get swept up in the hype machine. Nobody is immune to that."
11
"The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive."
10
"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
10
"We pacifists have not ceased to point to the grave danger of armaments and to insist on their curtailment."
10
"On the whole, the world was friendly. It chiefly depended on whether one were good or not."
10
"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."
10
"Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust."
10
"Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away."
9
"The "Western" is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself."
9
"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window."
9
"Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."
9
"Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them."
Old,
9
"In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising."
9
"That which is not, shall never be; that which is, shall never cease to be. To the wise, these truths are self-evident."
Self,
8
"Some television programs are so much chewing gum for the eyes."
8
"The more worrying feature of the new global corporate structures is their capacity to devastate national labour markets by transferring their operations to cheaper locations overseas."
8
"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."
8
"We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity."
8
"When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture."
8
"You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world."
8
"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."
8
"The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy."
8
"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."
8
bottom of page