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.

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

We live in and age of hyper-awareness, our senses extend around the globe, but it's the case of aesthetic overload: our technical zeal has outstripped our psychic capacity to cope with the influx of information.

Gene Youngblood

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.

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

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

Norman N. Holland

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

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

Edwin Denby (poet)

The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.

George Jean Nathan

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

There is something quite startling in the law that will gladden the hearts of eugenicists, who are considerable in number — though many are still in the closet. The section on Abortion Procedures declares that the state is not permitted to interfere — at any stage — in a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy if "the fetus is affected by genetic defect or serious deformity or abnormality."

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

Henry Theophilus Finck

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

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

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.

Ephemerality is the little magazine's generic fate; by promptly dying it gives proof that it remained loyal to its first program.

Frederick Crews

In trying to train the mind to judge of works of architecture, one can never be too patient.

Russell Sturgis

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

Harold Rosenberg

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.