"There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane"
About this Quote
The specific intent is to invert prestige. “Any ten minutes” is the tell: an aggressively unfair unit of measure meant to mock the way people invoke Kane as a credential. Card isn’t arguing that Twister is deeper; he’s arguing that competence and immediacy get underrated when we fetishize historical importance. Good acting, good writing - those are craft terms, not moral ones. He’s separating “works on a human in the moment” from “matters in film history,” and insisting the first category deserves more respect than we tend to give it.
Subtext: audiences and critics often confuse influence with pleasure, innovation with engagement. Kane changed the grammar of film; Twister, at its best, moves with clean motivations, legible stakes, and performances calibrated to entertain rather than impress. Card’s jab suggests that the canon can function like a museum: admirable, necessary, and occasionally dead on arrival for contemporary viewers.
Context matters, too. A science-fiction novelist who has long existed outside elite literary institutions, Card is staking a populist claim: standards should be grounded in execution, not reverence. The exaggeration is the point - not because Kane is bad, but because our rituals around “greatness” can be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite | Cite this Quote |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Card, Orson Scott. (n.d.). There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-is-more-good-writing-and-good-acting-in-any-151111/
Chicago Style
Card, Orson Scott. "There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane." FixQuotes. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-is-more-good-writing-and-good-acting-in-any-151111/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-is-more-good-writing-and-good-acting-in-any-151111/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.
