Critic Quotes

The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

C. K. Williams
C. K. Williams
Many books today suggest that the mass of women lead lives of noisy desperation.

I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world.

To see the films coming out of France is to break into a vast treasure and become liberated...

Art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully... art becomes our entree to the sublime.

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

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

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.

His thoughts were a loose skein of threads,
And tangled emotions, vague and dim;
And sacrificing what he loved
He lost the dearest part of him

William Braithwaite
William Braithwaite
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.

Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself

Inner slavery is even worse than outward slavery; and inner freedom is even better than outward freedom.

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.

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

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

To ask advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery.

John Churton Collins
John Churton Collins
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.

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.

Flatulency today consists in saying simply in several different ways the same thing over and over again.

The mistake which most critics make is to persist in trying to evaluate pop culture as if it were something else: the equivalent of insisting on considering a bicycle as if it were a horse.

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

When I was but thirteen or so
I went into a golden land,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Took me by the hand.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over-except when they are different.

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