Critic Quotes

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
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.

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

He that peruses Homer, is like the traveller that surveys mount Atlas; the vastness and roughness of its rocks, the solemn gloominess of its pines and cedars, the everlasting snows that cover its head, the torrents that rush down its sides, and the wild beasts that roar in its caverns, all contribute to strike the imagination with inexpressible astonishment and awe. While reading the Aeneid is like beholding the Capitoline hill at Rome, on which stood many edifices of exquisite architecture, and whose top was crowned with the famous temple of Jupiter, adorned with the spoils of conquered Greece.

Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution's less self-tortured forms.

Norman Spinrad
Norman Spinrad
Whether you're an entrepreneur, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company, great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling. That's a constant. What's always in flux, especially in this noisy, mobile world, is how, when, and where the story gets told, and even who gets to tell all of it.

Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk
What holy cities are to nomadic tribes — a symbol of race and a bond of union — great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.

Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it.

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.

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

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

Drinking good wine with good food in good company is one of life's most civilized pleasures.

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.

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.

An art machine is a system
whose parts when put in motion
act upon each other in such a way
as to cause you to see things differently

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The secret of pleasure in life, as distinct from its great triumphs of transcendent joy, is to live in a series of small, legitimate successes. By legitimate I mean such as are not accompanied by self-condemnation.

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

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.

Stephen Burt
Stephen Burt
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