Top 1112 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Critics - Page 15

Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.

The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.

In scene after scene, meaning sneaks in and sometimes roars.

I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It's basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

Perhaps that is what love is -- the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity.

Bill Maher does something amazing in Religulous. He makes Michael Moore look incredibly likable in comparison.

True love was beyond the bars, but a facsimile of it came with no suffering at all.

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

Only, as long as we're going insane we may as well go the whole way. A mere shred of sanity is of no value.

The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behaviour that merely to recognize it is to risk unravelling the entire fabric of civilization.

You might say I was a passive atheist through my teenage years.

Now that the Harry Potter series is over, maybe the truth can be realized: This has been the dullest franchise in the history of movie franchises.

Faith is seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness.

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.

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested, and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies.

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.

To be a critic, you have to have maybe three percent education, five percent intelligence, two percent style, and 90 percent gall and egomania in equal parts.

David Halberstam often wrote about the powerful, but his real sympathies lay with ordinary people. He was very uncomfortable with bigfoot Washington journalism - he thought it was lazy and self-serving.

The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans.

All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

I've always been a morning person, and what I don't get done in the morning I really don't get done at all.

The result is a twitching convulsion of vicious drivel passing itself off as a movie, which can be best appreciated by the kind of people who dig Showgirls, the Saw franchise and Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman flicks.

Television is a formidable thinking tool. You are like an analyst to whom society's subconscious would be offered wide open.

Nuance doesn't get retweeted.

Like springs, adaptations can only go downhill.

As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

Any man that can't find what he is looking for in a thousand women is really looking for a boy.

Farmiga proves as fearless a director as she is an actress. She lights up Higher Ground.

Garrel has succeeded in filming something we have never seen before: the faces of actors in silent films during those moments when the black intertitles, with their paltry, illuminated words, filled the screen.

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

Sen. McCain isn't someone who strikes you as a particularly dynamic speaker. He doesn't seem to like the formality of giving speeches. He clearly isn't too comfortable reading off a TelePrompter.

Phunny Business is a breezy, vivid, funny, star-studded and delightful valentine to comedy, entrepreneurship and the All-American impulse to make something out of nothing. The story of comedy club owner/inveterate dreamer Raymond Lambert and his heroic quest to create a safe, productive place for black stand-up comedians to hone their craft and find their voices isn't just a great Chicago story and a great comedy story: it's a flat-out great story, lovingly and engagingly told.

One of the general considerations about new buildings is that people tend to say that anything new is a monstrosity. And then after a while they either accept them or they go on thinking that they are monstrosities. Reactions vary. This depends to some extent on the quality of the building.

Tony Awards boost Broadway attendance and sell the shows on the road. They're the sugar to swat the fly. If you needed more explanation for the yearly ballyhoo, in the metropolitan areas where a Broadway show plays, the local economy is boosted by three and a half times the gross ticket sales. So when we're talking Tonys, we're talking moolah.

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.

In order to have a literature, a nation must live, not merely on the practical, but on the moral and spiritual plane as well, contributing through its national life to the development of some side of the universal spirit of man.

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.

It felt natural. That is what I remember most about becoming a father halfway through my 20s. As if Mother Nature was giving me the big thumbs up.

School is a foretaste of life.

If I go into a restaurant and the food sucks I feel so depressed I just want to carve it in my wrist with the butter knife.

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

Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.

Thunderous action and nail-biting suspense

The irrepressible spirit that made his playing seem like good conversation is the Rubinstein legacy for pianists, if they can pick up their heads from the keyboard long enough to claim it.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

There's controversy around Fox. I understand that.

Monopoly may also end in tears, but its tensions are cruder, lacking the infinitely subtle shadings of irritation and acrimony provided by Scrabble.

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness.

We are the playthings of the gods.

I've always been a news junkie, and an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, and this interest only ramped up during the campaign of 2016 and in the aftermath of the election.

Resignation is the courage of Christian sorrow.