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Quotes by Critic
"Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive."
9
"His acting remains forever fixed in a time that never dates."
9
"I just feel tired now if people are shocked. If it's not for you, just don't bloody watch it."
9
"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."
9
"The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it."
9
"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."
9
"How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question."
9
"Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives."
9
"No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead."
9
"Discretion is not the better part of biography."
9
"How prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid out Washington as a city that goes around in circles!"
9
"My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more."
9
"While it was occasionally done here or there, nobody else had a figurehead like Walt doing it. Jack Warner wasn't on TV. Walt was the boss, but he had a real public profile and he used it to his advantage. And he became a household face."
9
"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."
9
"Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know."
9
"In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless."
9
"IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction."
9
"I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story."
9
"The Holy Bible is an abyss. It is impossible to explain how profound it is, impossible to explain how simple it is."
9
"Uncertainty is the worst of all evils until the moment when reality makes us regret uncertainty."
9
"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."
9
"Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have."
9
"That's probably when I get the most angry at American movies, when they just so cynically manipulate the audience without even trying to give a good story."
9
"I think in conventional magazine wisdom, you need to have a redesign every decade or so."
9
"We define ourselves, in part, by the discriminations we make. The value of what we love is enriched by our understanding of what we dislike."
9
"The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell."
9
"Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies."
9
"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."
9
"Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions."
9
"People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know."
9
"Think of the wonderful circles in which our whole being moves and from which we cannot escape no matter how we try. The circler circles in these circles."
9
"Nothing ever quite dies, it just comes back in a different form."
9
"Age is not different from earlier life as long as you're sitting down."
9
"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,
9
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