Famous quotes by Critics

"For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We've had some very good fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven't seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project"

Harry Knowles, Critic

"As I've said many times, the single most oppressed class in America right now is the teenager"

Joe Bob Briggs, Critic

"Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book"

Malcolm Cowley, Critic

"If we practiced medicine like we practice education, we'd look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years"

Alfred Kazin, Critic

"For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss"

Edward Dowden, Critic

"Once you are dancing with the devil, the prettiest capers won't help you"

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Critic

"If I despised myself, it would be no compensation if everyone saluted me, and if I respect myself, it does not trouble me if others hold me lightly"

Max Nordau, Critic

"Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means"

Van Wyck Brooks, Critic

"But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"It is well to be alone. It fertilizes the creative impulse"

Max Nordau, Critic

"Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles... respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law... or, in a word, justice"

Max Nordau, Critic

"That's when it hit me. The site is more important than me"

Harry Knowles, Critic

"They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much"

Malcolm Cowley, Critic

"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens"

Malcolm Cowley, Critic

"The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life"

Leon Edel, Critic

"It has an air about it of having strolled in from the street with a few tricks up its sleeve, and if everybody would relax, please, it would do its best to pass the time whimsically"

Walter Kerr, Critic

"He had delusions of adequacy"

Walter Kerr, Critic

"Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them"

Walter Kerr, Critic

"The artist writes, paints, sings or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind"

Max Nordau, Critic

"Think of the wonderful circles in which our whole being moves and from which we cannot escape no matter how we try. The circler circles in these circles"

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Critic

"It is nearly always the most improbable things that really come to pass"

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Critic

"How prone poor Humanity is to dam up the minutest remnants of its freedom, and build an artificial roof to prevent it looking up to the clear blue sky"

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Critic

"The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and, at its most coherent, probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism"

Elizabeth Hardwick, Critic

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination"

Elizabeth Hardwick, Critic

"The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy"

Elizabeth Hardwick, Critic

"Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous"

Elizabeth Hardwick, Critic

"Harpo Marx looks like a musical comedy"

Walter Kerr, Critic

"What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"But I never listen to music while I'm writing"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

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