20th-century Critic Quotes

My father has always held out Scientology and auditing to be based purely on science and not on religious "belief" or faith. We regularly promised and distributed publications with "scientific guarantees". This was and has always been common practice. My father and I created a "religious front" only for tax purposes and legal protection 'from fraud Claims'. We almost always told nearly everyone that Scientology was really science, not a religion, but that the religious front was created to deal with the government.

We live in and age of hyper-awareness, our senses extend around the globe, but it's the case of aesthetic overload: our technical zeal has outstripped our psychic capacity to cope with the influx of information.

Gene Youngblood
Gene Youngblood
There is something quite startling in the law that will gladden the hearts of eugenicists, who are considerable in number — though many are still in the closet. The section on Abortion Procedures declares that the state is not permitted to interfere — at any stage — in a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy if "the fetus is affected by genetic defect or serious deformity or abnormality."

Drinking good wine with good food in good company is one of life's most civilized pleasures.

This month all eyes turn, once again, to the Cannes Film Festival, where hustlers and hipsters lie on the sand and look at the stars or vice versa.
Sometimes quoted as: Cannes is where you lie on the beach and stare at the stars—or vice versa.

If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.

Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.

Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it.

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
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.

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

The first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise... and cultivate the delightfully vague.

W C Williams' poetry is: The Imagism of 1912, self-transduced.

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.

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.

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

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

This [Oh, Calcutta!] is the kind of show to give pornography a dirty name.

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.

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