American Critic Quotes

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

It was Mrs. Campbell, for instance, who, on a celebrated occasion, threw her companion into a flurry by describing her recent marriage as "the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue."

Alexander Woollcott
Alexander Woollcott
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.

Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda
Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

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.

Film criticism became the means whereby a stream of young intellectuals could go straight from the campus film society into the professionals' screening room without managing to get a glimpse of the real world in between.

An art machine is a system
whose parts when put in motion
act upon each other in such a way
as to cause you to see things differently

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company, great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling. That's a constant. What's always in flux, especially in this noisy, mobile world, is how, when, and where the story gets told, and even who gets to tell all of it.

Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk
What holy cities are to nomadic tribes — a symbol of race and a bond of union — great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.

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.

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.

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

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

Compliment is taken literally only by the savage. The accuracy of compliment is not that of algebra.

A poem lies inert, like Sleeping Beauty, until we love it into life.

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.

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?

Lin Carter
Lin Carter