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Quotes by Critic

"It didn't seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn't know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility."

"When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest."

"You need to have a redesign because familiarity breeds a kind of complacency."

"To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved."

"The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad."

"We grow like flowers, and bear desire, The odor of the human flowers."

"As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society."

"My personal philosophy is, you can be sure of nothing."

"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."


"It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it."

"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."

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

"These are the people who do studies that your carry-out Chinese meals are saturated in fat. I'd just like to meet them! I mean, what do they do for pleasure?"

"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,

"If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad."

"No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece."

"In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read."

"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."

"I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly."


"But as we shall see, Roosevelt, through a combination of events and influences, fell deeper and deeper into the toils of various revolutionary operators, not because he was interested in revolution but because he was interested in votes."

"Discretion is not the better part of biography."

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

"My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more."

"I'm very grateful to Jennifer Lopez, because I have something to talk about for the last couple of years."

"Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration."
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