20th-century Critic Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

C. K. Williams
C. K. Williams
The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.

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
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.