20th-century Critic Quotes

Odysseus Elytis
Herbert Read
A. S. Byatt
Michael Moorcock
Frank O'Hara
Northrop Frye
Norman Spinrad

When we root-root-root for the home team, we're rooting for our home as much as the team.

Richard Roeper
Richard Roeper
In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed.

It is one thing to do your dance on a beach and quite another to collaborate intimately with the sand.

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics.... English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.

Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,

I don't know what art is, but I do know what it isn't. And it isn't someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder, or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent.

The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was. Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems…Its insights are fairly lame at this point.

Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.

Whether these characters are lovable or detestable, they're lovable or detestable in a TV way - defined by a minimal set of traits that are endlessly reiterated and incapable of expansion or alteration, a fixed loop.

Gandhi was everything the voting members of the Academy would like to be: moral, tanned and thin.

Joe Morgenstern
Joe Morgenstern
We want to do something and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results then we must use certain meanings or definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose, or to bar us from other purposes.

Her cooking is the missionary position of cooking. That is how everybody starts.
Defending Delia Smith

Everyone lies about sex, more or less, to themselves if not to others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance or minimizing its pull.

There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.

If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were "candles in the wind," and Anna Nicole Smith was a bonfire in a hailstorm, and Lindsay Lohan is an electric toaster thrown intentionally into a Jacuzzi, then Paris Hilton s a strobe light in an epilepsy ward.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison are the greatest composers since Beethoven, with Paul McCartney way out in front.

The cinema gives us a substitute world which fits our desires.

Tony Randall was the Laurence Olivier of light comic actors.

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt
Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of reason with unreason.

Never work for a liberal employer, dear boy, they'll sack you on Christmas Eve.
Learned at his father's knee

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Opportunity does not need to be exactly equal. It needs only to exist. For the talented and motivated, that will be enough...The vital thing is not to maximize everyone's performance, but to ensure maximal performance from the most talented, the ones who can make a difference.