Top 3 Quotes & Sayings by Gilbert Seldes

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Gilbert Seldes.
Last updated on September 19, 2024.
Gilbert Seldes

Gilbert Vivian Seldes was an American writer and cultural critic. Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine The Dial and hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz (1958). He also wrote for other magazines and newspapers like Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. He was most interested in American popular culture and cultural history. He wrote and adapted for Broadway, including Lysistrata and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1930s. Later, he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Suddenly, as though in a dream, this apparition, this double apparition, approached me. The two most beautiful people in the world were floating toward me, smiling. It was as if they were angelic visitors. I thought to myself, 'If there is anything I can do to keep them as beautiful as they are, I will do it.'
In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romantic, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone.
Comedy is the last refuge of the non-comformist mind. — © Gilbert Seldes
Comedy is the last refuge of the non-comformist mind.
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