Famous quotes by Critics

"I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music"

Lester Bangs, Critic

"The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light"

George Steiner, Critic

""Old times" never come back, and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better"

George Edward Woodberry, Critic

"The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"I also did an Ozzy piece for him, and so I got hired. Everything happened really fast. I can't give people advice, because everything in my life changed completely in less than a year and it's still not something I am used to"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"A lot of people have this strategy where, if they have a hard question, they wait to ask it to the end of the interview, because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"In Fargo, they say, well, that's a job. How well do you get paid? For example, for this book I was written about in Entertainment Weekly, and it was kind of cool because my mom asked me if Entertainment Weekly was a magazine or a newspaper?"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"I've been asked about this constantly, and I compare it to how if you're walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and vomits on you: You wouldn't be hurt by that, you'd just think it's weird"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?"

George Edward Woodberry, Critic

"The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change, though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"You're trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"A whole bunch of months passed, and I didn't hear anything, and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"When you're writing for newspapers, you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"It didn't seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn't know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"I keep saying the word "weird" over and over again, but it's the only way I can describe it"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"I grew up on a farm, and we didn't have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn't inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper's Prairie had few followers"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

"The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies"

Carl Clinton Van Doren, Critic

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