Critic Quotes

Ezra Pound

John Ruskin

Odysseus Elytis

Matthew Arnold

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Sergei Diaghilev

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.

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

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.

Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,

Christopher Benfey

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

Not so much a film as a visual essay, exquisitely directed and photographed (by Sacha Vierny)... Difficult to watch but well worthwhile for those willing to be challenged.

Back o'er the deep I turn my longing eyes,
And chide the wayward passions that rebel:
Yet boots it not to think, or to complain,
Musing sad ditties to the reckless main.
To dreams like these, adieu! the pealing bell
Speaks of the hour that stays not—and the day
To life's sad turmoil calls my heart away.

William Lisle Bowles

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

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

Russell Sturgis

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

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

To all who pass that they may see, Rock 'N' Roll was a part of me.

The word "Silence" today sounds "bridegroom" or the "tragedy of love".

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

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.

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.

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.

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

You will find many a creature by earth, air, and water, that is more beautiful than a woman.

Elizabeth Montagu

I was a freak, but happily my freakishness was language, not, say, classifying antique crankshafts.

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

Harold Rosenberg

Without enthusiasm, the adventurer could never kindle that fire in his followers which is so necessary to consolidate their mutual interests; for no one can heartily deceive numbers who is not first of all deceived himself.

William Warburton

If the soup had been as warm as the wine;
if the wine had been as old as the turkey;
and if the turkey had had a breast like the maid,
it would have been a swell dinner.

Hullo! What's this? What are these funny brown-and-olive landscapes doing in an impressionist exhibition? Brown! I ask you? Isn't it absurd for a man to go on using brown and call himself an impressionist painter?