Famous quotes by Critics

"It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel"

Malcolm Cowley, Critic

"Age is not different from earlier life as long as you're sitting down"

Malcolm Cowley, Critic

"Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim, a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes"

Leon Edel, Critic

"Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright"

Van Wyck Brooks, Critic

"Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more"

Elizabeth Hardwick, Critic

"The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis"

Leon Edel, Critic

"So the system we have in radio and television today is the direct result of government policies that have been made in our name, in the name of the people, on our behalf, but without our informed consent"

Robert McChesney, Critic

"So it's a much more difficult issue to organize around, because you can't get media at all to make your case. And that's where cases tend to be made politically"

Robert McChesney, Critic

"If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?"

Van Wyck Brooks, Critic

"When the government picked companies and gave them monopoly rights to frequencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, it was picking the winners of the competition; it wasn't setting the terms of the competition"

Robert McChesney, Critic

"Basically what they're saying is, if you want to be on TV, if you want to be a credible candidate, you've got to buy ads. And if you're not buying ads, you're not a credible candidate, we don't cover you"

Robert McChesney, Critic

"What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"I've been at this for 40 years. And as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man"

Van Wyck Brooks, Critic

"People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding"

Van Wyck Brooks, Critic

"Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And what is more, they find it everywhere"

Van Wyck Brooks, Critic

"What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"Well, it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"My father, who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and, by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"What I've found is that there is a tremendous interest in these issues, across the political spectrum, sort of left-right terms we used to describe people don't really hold here, exactly"

Robert McChesney, Critic

"The public gets not one penny from them in return for those airwaves"

Robert McChesney, Critic

"The commercial broadcasters have tremendous influence in Washington, D.C., for a couple of reasons. First, they're extremely rich and they have lots of money and they have had for a long time, so they can give money to politicians, which gets their attention"

Robert McChesney, Critic

"So the competition isn't once you got the license, running the station; it's getting the license"

Robert McChesney, Critic

"One survey that I saw that was published, I think, in Variety or Electronic Media within the last three weeks, says that now the average hour of radio in the United States has 18 minutes of commercials"

Robert McChesney, Critic

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