Critic Quotes

Ezra Pound
John Ruskin
Odysseus Elytis
Matthew Arnold
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Sergei Diaghilev

In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed.

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

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.

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

Richard Roeper
Richard Roeper
A song to the oak, the brave old oak,
Who hath ruled in the greenwood long!

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.

If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.

Morn on the waters, and purple and bright Bursts on the billows the flushing of light O'er the glad waves, like a child of the sun, See the tall vessel goes gallantly on.

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

In holy music's golden speech Remotest notes to notes respond: Each octave is a world; yet each Vibrates to worlds beyond its own.

This [Oh, Calcutta!] is the kind of show to give pornography a dirty name.

Greek the language they gave me;
poor the house on Homer's shores.
My only care my language on Homer's shores.
There bream and perch
windbeaten verbs,
green sea currents in the blue.

Odysseus Elytis
Odysseus Elytis
At about six in the morning of July 3, 1860, while I was watering my petunias, and thinking of nothing in particular, I perceived coming towards me, a tall, beardless, fair-haired young fellow, wearing a German cap and gold-rimmed spectacles.

No writer or speaker who ignores the roots of Latin derivatives is secure from egregious error.

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.

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

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.

Never tell a young person that something cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.

When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

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.

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

Frederick Crews
Frederick Crews
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.

Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.

George Saintsbury
George Saintsbury
The cinema gives us a substitute world which fits our desires.