American Critic Quotes

Ezra Pound

Frank O'Hara

Norman Spinrad

Stephen Greenblatt

Alexander Woollcott

Leonard Maltin

Pauline Kael

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

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.

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

Edwin Denby (poet)

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

John Crosby (media critic)

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.

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

Any photographer worth his/her salt - that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagistic bent - can make virtually anything look good. Which means, of course, that she or he can make virtually anything look bad - or look just about any way at all. After all, that is the real work of photography: making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image.

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

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

Tony Randall was the Laurence Olivier of light comic actors.

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.

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.

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.

Frank Lentricchia

Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of reason with unreason.

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

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.

When love first dawns on the mind, the faintest superficial contact flashes along the nerves as a thrill of delicious emotion.

Henry Theophilus Finck

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

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.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

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.

Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,

Christopher Benfey

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.

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

Let there be no mincing of comparisons in this assertion. Not Turner, not Monet, painted so directly blinding shafts of sunlight as has this Spaniard.