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Quotes by Critic
"Lifestyle feminism ushered in a notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism. And the assumption prevailed that no matter what a woman's politics, be she conservative or liberal, she too could fit feminism into her existing lifestyle."
17
"The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it."
17
"The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances."
17
"They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much."
Mind,
17
"In Fargo, they say, well, that's a job. How well do you get paid? For example, for this book I was written about in Entertainment Weekly, and it was kind of cool because my mom asked me if Entertainment Weekly was a magazine or a newspaper."
17
"In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something."
17
"It might be argued that genuine spontaneity is not really possible or desirable so long as printed scores of great works exist. All modern musicians are, for better or worse, prisoners of Gutenberg."
17
"Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience."
17
"The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism."
17
"The Rockwell magazine cover was more a part of the American reality than a record of it."
17
"The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope."
17
"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."
17
"Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions."
17
"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."
17
"John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student."
17
"There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it."
17
"Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas."
17
"Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place."
17
"Though the clown is often deadpan, he is a connoisseur of laughter."
17
"A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses."
17
"At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action."
17
"The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."
17
"Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies."
17
"Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold."
17
"The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature."
17
"Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin."
16
"His acting remains forever fixed in a time that never dates."
16
"He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace."
16
"In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought."
16
"Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open."
16
"If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad."
16
"Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses."
16
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