Critic Quotes

How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? Start with a large fortune and buy a winery.

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

A woman scorn'd is pitiless as fate,
For then the dread of shame adds stings to hate.

William Gifford

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

Never work for a liberal employer, dear boy, they'll sack you on Christmas Eve.

Learned at his father's knee

Philip Hope-Wallace

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

Nancy Banks-Smith

I don't know what art is, but I do know what it isn't. And it isn't someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder, or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent.

Her cooking is the missionary position of cooking. That is how everybody starts.

Defending Delia Smith

It is science that brings us an understanding of the true complexity of natural systems. The insights from the science of ecology are teaching us how to work with the checks and balances of nature, and encouraging a new, rational, limited-input, environmentally sound means of vineyard management that offers a third way between the ideologically driven approach of Biodynamics and conventional chemical-based agricultural systems.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.

Margo Jefferson

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

Norman N. Holland

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

There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time,
When asked 'Why a third?'
He replied, 'One's absurd!
And bigamy, Sir, is a crime!'

William Cosmo Monkhouse

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

Joe Morgenstern

On Rousseau's 'Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains':

It would be equally correct to say that sheep are born carnivorous, and everywhere they nibble grass.

Without the striving for infinity there is no life, no development, and no progress.

Vissarion Belinsky

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Edwin Denby (poet)

There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion.

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

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.