American Critic Quotes

Ezra Pound

Frank O'Hara

Norman Spinrad

Stephen Greenblatt

Alexander Woollcott

Leonard Maltin

Pauline Kael

We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to 'the needs of society', or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

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

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

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.

Whitney Balliett

What is video art? How does it differ from commercial television? Is video art linked to such traditional art forms as painting and sculpture? Is it a totally new phenomenon?

Gregory Battcock

Although The Terminator is arguably the more visionary of the first two films, [Terminator 2] is the more visually and viscerally satisfying. It's an exhausting experience and, even 18 years after its release (as I write this review), few films have matched it within the science fiction genre for sheer white-knuckle exhilaration.

James Berardinelli

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self.... The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

The man is ugly, the man is evil, and the man is in love. This is gonna be an American classic.

Like every great tradition, my family had to die before I could understand how much I missed them and what they meant to me. When they went into the flames at the crematorium, all my letters of introduction went with them.

Anatole Broyard

Umm, said Ooo, dubiously.
Do I detect a questioning tone in your voice? inquired the bird tartly. Which might imply that you find a flaw in my reasoning?

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.

Those journeys, with their serendipitous discoveries and misguided side trips, allow us to probe our characters, indulge our passions and prejudices, and finally choose books for which we possess a real affinity.

One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.

William H. Gass

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.

William A. Henry III

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up.

A good sonnet appears to be a confession-in a word either patently artificial, and then it is bad, or good, then it sounds like autobiography.

George Lyman Kittredge

Science fiction … means what we point to when we say it.

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its nonmystical methods; above all... of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

Louis Kronenberger

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

We are getting to be of an age when it is difficult to grow new friends; we haven't the energy, the time to cultivate; each one gone is a permanent impoverishment.

I dwell no more in Arcady, But when the sky is blue with May, And birds are blithe and winds are free, I know what message is for me, For I have been in Arcady.

Louise Chandler Moulton

It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.

I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions.

Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which... can be dispensed with.

Harold Rosenberg

For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent... It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions.

Herbert Schiller