Top 1112 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Critics - Page 2

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others.

The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.

A politics of vengeance is not politics. Revenge is a recklessness towards the future in a vain attempt to make the present abolish a suffering which is already past.

Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.

I'm immensely grateful for the precious gift my mother has given me. She is my hero today and every day.

Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening.

Which is supposed to mean they're doing something in their broadcasting they would not do is they were simply out to maximize profit; if they were really public service institutions, not purely profit maximizing institutions.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

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

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

It's not a crime to get drunk.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

It was never my intention to hurt people's feelings.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

It is sometimes easier to have furniture made than to find things.

I'm a lifelong bachelor, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't marry the right woman.

One of my favorite things, as a critic, was finding books by new writers who possessed a distinctive voice and vision, an inventive gift for storytelling. I also loved immersing myself in works of nonfiction that taught me something about the world, that made the past come alive or shed light on hidden corners of history or the news.

In life, particularly in public life, psychology is more powerful than logic.

Kevin Kline gives a master class in acting. He finds every nuance of mirth and melancholy in this wonder of a role and rides it to glory. You can't take your eyes off him.

Television news was expanding to an hour, and producers did not know how to fill the space and time.

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

You've got to have a gimmick if your band sucks.

Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.

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

The movie industry is failing women. And until the industry starts making serious changes, nothing is going to change.

Between the action sequences, the pleasure lies in observing impeccably dressed Brits exchanging barbed witticisms - making it, basically, Downton Abbey with cyber crime and shower sex.

I react very badly when mediocrity throws a tantrum of entitlement.

If we knew each other's secrets, what comforts we should find.

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.

Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress.

I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.

Through the magic of motion pictures, someone who's never left Peoria knows the softness of a Paris spring, the color of a Nile sunset, the sorts of vegetation one will find along the upper Amazon and that Big Ben has not yet gone digital.

Ewan McGregor stars as Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi, again doing a fine Alec Guinness impersonation but otherwise seeming lost and alone in the galaxy as the one actor attempting to give a real performance in this mess.

Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.

People moan about Twitter, people being rude and trolling. Just turn it off. Life goes on.

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

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.

They who seek religion for culture's sake are aesthetic, not religious, and will never gain that grace which religion adds to culture, because they never can have the religion.

I am sort of a tea addict. I structure my day by cups of tea.

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

I've always said to people that auteurism is nice, but it's hypothetical, and gradually you learn how much or how little influence different directors had.

One's worth and self-regard ought to come from individual competitive performance, not from group identity. Pride based on clan or tribal connections is atavistic. It appeals to people who fear they cannot succeed as individuals, and by diverting their energies it all but ensures they will not succeed as individuals.

The secret to success is written on the doors of this auditorium. One side says 'Push,' the other side says 'Pull.

In a lot of ways I think food is starting to take the place in culture that rock and roll took 30 years ago.

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.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

I am a Leo. I was born in August and I love the sunshine. I'm like a cat. We live in a very contemporary house with windows all around it. Wherever a sunspot is, I go to it with my yellow pad and my fountain pen and I write there.

Good choreography fuses eye, ear and mind.

Orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy.

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.