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Quotes by Critic

"He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies."


"Silly sitcoms are designed to attract juveniles of all ages."

"No one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves."

"It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else."


"You know, a left-winger, the barrier to success if you're on the left in commercial radio is a mile and a half higher than it is if you're on the right."

"How prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid out Washington as a city that goes around in circles!"


"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."


"If you're doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you're not going to have a relationship with them, they're not going to like you, they're not going to be your friend."


"Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle."

"Discourse is fleeting, but junk mail is forever."


"The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster."


"The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that."


"Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words."


"In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising."


"I believe that the responsibility of the winemaker is to take that fruit and get it into the bottle as the most natural and purest expression of that vineyard, of the grape varietal or blend, and of the vintage."

"Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!"

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."


"Let the devil catch you but by a single hair, and you are his forever."

"How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question."

"Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?"

"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."

"The best ally you can have in breaking up a street fight is a grandmother."


"I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner."

"It seems that it is madder never to abandon one's self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor."
Self,


"Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions."


"Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact."


"We pacifists have not ceased to point to the grave danger of armaments and to insist on their curtailment."

"The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote."

"Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and preactice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving."

"If a liberal News channel were launched it would fall flat on its face."
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