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Quotes by Critic

"If some things don't make you lose your sense of reason, then you have none to lose."

"There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

"There are men who would quickly love each other if once they were speak to each other; for when they spoke they would discover that their souls had only separated by phantoms and delusions."

"Because what's going on now, and this applies mostly to television stations in the largest markets too, but TV stations basically are now the primary receivers of campaign spending."


"The Fox News cable channel is doing very well because there is a market for what Fox News has to offer."
News,


"What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off."
Life,

"It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end."


"A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it."

"You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb."

"Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go."


"Part of life is to live it, and enjoy it, and seize the moments that you find particularly pleasing."


"Every Arab nation votes against us at least two thirds of the time."

"If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people."


"I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about."

"And doing so you can recreate yourself and you can also come up with something that is not only original and creative and artistic, but also maybe even decent, or moral if I can use words like that, or something that's like basically good."


"These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism."

"Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems."

"I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off."


"My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish."

"The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans."

"The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history."

"Maybe if you and ten of your friends could pool your savings and borrow some money and actually buy some obscure station in Sonoma, and then take some chances and have some fun."

"The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive - you are leaking."

"Los Angeles has the greatest concentration of surviving movie palaces in the United States, yet most residents have never been inside one of them."

"It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in."


"Fettuccine Alfredo is dangerous for your health."


"But among them now were a large number of Communists in positions of great power within the new union movement, some of them actually moving close to the center of power. This was the crack in the wall through which they entered. Their power was to grow and prosper."

"Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant."


"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end."


"We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."

""Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better."
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