20th-century Critic Quotes

Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,

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.

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.

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.

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

Among the admirable American expressions which enter our language from time to time to lend it new vitality, there is one which I would have every audience, and every lecturer, use at the end of every lecture or course: So what? What does all this amount to.

Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA (media-specific analysis). Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view.

N. Katherine Hayles
N. Katherine Hayles
The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

C. K. Williams
C. K. Williams
Many books today suggest that the mass of women lead lives of noisy desperation.

I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world.

To see the films coming out of France is to break into a vast treasure and become liberated...

Art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully... art becomes our entree to the sublime.

Michael Kimmelman
Michael Kimmelman
The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets.

Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.

Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records be kept in images and sounds.

Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself

Inner slavery is even worse than outward slavery; and inner freedom is even better than outward freedom.

If we are not to go to pieces or wither away, we all must have some purpose in life; for no man can live for himself alone.

Never tell a young person that something cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.

The mistake which most critics make is to persist in trying to evaluate pop culture as if it were something else: the equivalent of insisting on considering a bicycle as if it were a horse.

George Melly
George Melly
To all who pass that they may see, Rock 'N' Roll was a part of me.

Art itself shuns commonality: while the scientist may seek the phenomenon that repeats itself, the artist seeks the exception.

Greek the language they gave me;
poor the house on Homer's shores.
My only care my language on Homer's shores.
There bream and perch
windbeaten verbs,
green sea currents in the blue.

Odysseus Elytis
Odysseus Elytis
There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion.

Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren