Top 1112 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Critics - Page 16

Bring a child and ignore your inhibitions.

Integrity has been enhanced.

There are people I've blocked for a long time who will still respond to every single person that replies positively to me on Twitter. I have quite a few cyber-stalkers like that.

I just feel tired now if people are shocked. If it's not for you, just don't bloody watch it.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

Always remember that better days are ahead - if not in this life, in the next.

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

Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie, reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from pure ballistic force of personality, like Joe Pesci in a bad mood. I can respect bad acting that owns its own style.

Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.

I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn't real, race isn't real.

Fear is a belief - beliefs can be changed.

It well becomes a man who is no longer young to forget that he ever was.

I am a child of Hollywood and dreams. To me, to be on the red carpet is the best place in the world.

Why does a writer labor over nuance and context if it won't be respected, if a critic insists on ignoring the writing at hand in favor of a more convenient analysis of his or her own particular pet peeves and straw men?

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

F For Fake is a talentless concoction of unparalleled ineptitude... It would have been a more generous gesture to show a retrospective of old Welles films rather than remind everyone of how low his ability as a filmmaker has plummeted.

The belief in a Divine education, open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by culture, supplements, and perfects it.

Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist.

Religion may have been the original cure; Freud reminds us that it was also the original disease.

Art criticism everywhere is now at a low ebb, intellectually corrupt, swamped in meaningless jargon, distorted by political correctitudes, anxiously addressed only to other critics and their ilk.

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.

Like many natural beauties, New York is effortlessly photogenic. It has fabulous bones and hardly any bad angles.

As a performer, I could be like, "I don't want to leave that in there." But as a producer, I have to leave it in there.

American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we'd become.

A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.

I am a noncook, although I'm very interested and have a large collection of cookbooks.

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world off-kilter? It’s like leaving the train at the wrong stop: You are still you, but in a new place, there by accident or grace, and you will need your wits about you to proceed.

A great work of art is one that continues to repay attention.

You have to be willing to recognize failure.

According to U.S. strategy, if you never see the other, his destruction will be more acceptableso that when Iraqi soldiers surrendered, sooner than expected, it was as if they emerged from a dream, a flash-back, a lost epoch--an epoch when the enemy still had a body and was still "like us.

The problem with capitalism is that it best rewards the worst part of us: the ruthless, competitive, conniving, opportunistic, acquisitive drives, giving little reward and often much punishment-or at least much handicap-to honesty, compassion, fair play, many forms of hard work, love of justice, and a concern for those in need.

I'm trying to expand the notion of curating. Exhibitions need not only take place in galleries, need not only involve displaying objects. Art can appear where we expect it least.

Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.

The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall.

It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.

Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment.

I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

As he demonstrated with 'Juno' and 'Up in the Air,' Reitman has an uncanny knack among contemporary directors for tapping into the zeitgeist in dramatically satisfying ways.

Passion with another cannot sustain a relationship. Passion exists in the moment, and this moment passes into a memory. In order to sustain a relationship, you must be passionately alive. As a result, you will continue to bring your passion to the one you love. You will not need it to come from another, because you will be sharing your abounding supply from within you.

The best ally you can have in breaking up a street fight is a grandmother.

If you look at pictures of David O. Selznick , he wasn't even attractive. There's no way to portray him in a way that is glamorous, but that's one of the things that's fascinating to me about him.

All you care about with your parents is that they are happy, and my mother is exceptionally happy at the moment, and I've always adored my stepfather, and he's always been a kind and good and lovely man.

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.

In the reality - TV era, unstable behavior become a valid career choice.

Although prefabrication has a long history - the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples - the idea took on a new impetus with the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution.

When it's done properly, taco should be a verb.

For so many years fashion was shrouded in mystery, this glamorous profession that people knew very little about, they thought it was so glamorous. It now has become so available, with the Internet, with shops like H&M and Target that do designer collaborations, so it's more available to everyone and that's created more interest.

I have found having my dad as my North Star has worked well for me.

I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

The beggar wears all colors fearing none.

But love is really more of an interactive process. It's about what we do not just what we feel. It's a verb, not a noun.

The very essence of school is elitism. Schools exist to teach, to test, to rank hierarchically to promote the idea that knowing and understanding more is better than knowing and understanding less.

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.

Fully stripped down, an onion is a pile of scattered layers; it has no center.

A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his job when he does feel like it.

Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social goals.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

You can never predict how something will land.