Critic Quotes

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.

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

W C Williams' poetry is: The Imagism of 1912, self-transduced.

What is video art? How does it differ from commercial television? Is video art linked to such traditional art forms as painting and sculpture? Is it a totally new phenomenon?

Opportunity does not need to be exactly equal. It needs only to exist. For the talented and motivated, that will be enough...The vital thing is not to maximize everyone's performance, but to ensure maximal performance from the most talented, the ones who can make a difference.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

If I had a device, it would be the true, the true only, leaving the beautiful and the good to settle matters afterwards as best they could.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Never work for a liberal employer, dear boy, they'll sack you on Christmas Eve.
Learned at his father's knee

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.

It is one thing to do your dance on a beach and quite another to collaborate intimately with the sand.

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

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.

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

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

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
William Lisle Bowles
We want to do something and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results then we must use certain meanings or definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose, or to bar us from other purposes.

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

Joe Morgenstern
Joe Morgenstern
Whether these characters are lovable or detestable, they're lovable or detestable in a TV way - defined by a minimal set of traits that are endlessly reiterated and incapable of expansion or alteration, a fixed loop.

Science is the great cleanser of the human thinking; it makes impossible any religion but the highest.

Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.

The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was. Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems…Its insights are fairly lame at this point.

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.

Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,

Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.