20th-century Critic Quotes

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.

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

Joe Morgenstern
Joe Morgenstern
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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Avant-garde art has become habitual, a dead letter with little spiritual consequence, however materially refined.

Donald Kuspit
Donald Kuspit
It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.

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
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.

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

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
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.

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

There is more suspense, more dramatic torque, in one page of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's heart-racked ruminations onthe Christian consciencethaninall Demi Moore's woodland gallops and horizontal barn dancing.

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.

Save it all; you do not know the value things will come to have until the world grows dim around you, and your things —however doubtful in the changing light, things are what you have left. And all you have.

Though the clown is often deadpan, he is a connoisseur of laughter.

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

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.