Top 1112 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Critics - Page 3

The higher the voice the smaller the intellect.

There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.

Art has knowledge and skills, and to come to know them is to be implicitly against a culture that is against knowledge - today's mass culture, which aims to produce a lot of consuming morons.

I always thought of YouTube as this super-finite thing where trends ebb and flow.

No longer do we accept the 'sublimation model' according to which 'the function of art is to sublimate or transform experience, raising it from ordinary to extraordinary, from commonplace to unique, from low to high'.

Just living in Los Angeles guarantees the loss of a few I.Q. points each year.

On the subject of wild mushrooms, it is easy to tell who is an expert and who is not: The expert is the one who is still alive.

Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge'they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.

The pursuit of approval usually ends in disaster.

If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema.

Where food trucks are concerned, nothing's better than having a whole flock of them at one location. Competition not only improves the quality of the food, it prompts these rolling lunch wagons to lower prices and offer specials, too.

Self-confidence is inseparable from submission to the creedal order, and through that order, to the supreme authority expressed in that order. ... Deep individualism cannot exist except in relation to the highest authority. No inner discipline can operate without a charismatic institution, nor can such an institution survive without that supreme authority from a relation to whom self-confidence derives. Without an authority deeply installed, there is no foundation for individuality. Self-confidence thus expresses submission to supreme authority.

The scene that scares you the most, that you don't want to write because it's the most difficult to write-that's the one you have to write. So I think when people have writer's block, it's because what they have to write scares them. And that's usually the heart of the book.

Audiences looking for a rich, textured, cinematic experience will be put off and disconcerted by an image that looks more like an advanced version of high definition television than a traditional movie.

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

A feat - of access and of passionate and appropriately unsettling political commentary.

Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.

If you love everything you do, you will probably end up with mediocre work. I think dissatisfaction with the state of things does propel creative people forward.

Never take biblical interpretation lightly. Never assume you've arrived or learned all that you can. Be a lifelong learner, but always apply what you're learning to yourself in real-life situations. Accurate interpretation is meant to lead to obedience.

The Holy Bible is an abyss. It is impossible to explain how profound it is, impossible to explain how simple it is.

The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.

Guy Ritchie is the worst screenwriter in the world, but, to be fair, he is not the worst director. He is only the worst director of the people who actually get to make movies. As we speak, there are human beings walking the Earth - perhaps as many as a half dozen of them - with less directorial talent, but they've been safely diverted into other activities.

If a work of art or a new style disturbs you, then it is probably good work. If you hate it, it is probably great.

On the question of women's sexual freedom or female independence, there are still issues that haven't been worked out. There's an aura of traditional gender roles that is not talked about that really permeates these conversations. There is this vacillation between a desire for independence and having the kinds of sexual freedom that men have and, on the other side, issues about female vulnerability and susceptibility to male aggression and violence. We need more honesty about the actual conditions in which sex is happening.

When I sound real, I'm fake, and when I sound fake, I'm real.

The corniest movie ever made about the white man's need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.

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.

In "The Myth of Sisyphus", his most important non-fiction work, Albert Camus suggested that if we believed what most people claim to be the purpose of life, we would feel compelled to commit suicide. If, however, we accept that life has no purpose we would be inclined to soldier on in a cussed, stoical manner like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his rock up a hill only to see it roll down again.

As a people, our most cherished and valuable achievements are the achievements of spirit. With an Afrocentric spirit, all things can be made to happen; it is the source of genuine revolutionary commitment.

Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.

Geniuses are people who notice things and connections between things which others haven't noticed. Genius must be a surprise.

Even the most daring and accomplished people have undergone tremendous difficulty. In fact, the more successful they became, the more they attributed their success to the lessons learned during their most difficult times. Adversity is our teacher. When we view adversity as a guide towards greater inner growth, we will then learn to accept the wisdom our soul came into this life to learn.

The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. NASCAR, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we're lucky, we all have at least one.

Mixed use is what cities are all about. If you don't have mixed use, you don't have cities.

God has never ceased to be the one true aim of all right human aspirations.

Against the odds, John Carter is itself pretty amazing-an epic pulp saga that slowly rises to the level of its best imitations and wins you over by degrees. I say that as a grown-up moviegoer; behind me at a recent screening was a row of 10-year-old boys who were ecstatically in from the get-go. That's probably all that matters.

Any method by which you get to see things that you haven't seen before hones your practiced ability to make connections.

Words are the legs of the mind; they bear it about, carry It from point to point, bed it down at night, and keep it off the ground and out of the marsh and mists.

The complex ways in which we produce and reproduce the world in technologically developed societies involves the ways in which we separate ourselves into public and private persons, producing and consuming persons and so on, and the ways in which we as people negotiate and cope with those divisions. Stars are about all that, and are one of the most significant ways we have for making sense of it all. That is why they matter to us, and why they are worth thinking about.

The movies are celluloid hemorrhoids. No, worse: They're celluloid Bon Jovi.

Judging by the the movie's enduring popularity, the message that stupidity is redemption is clearly what a lot of Americans want to hear.

I bargained with Life for a penny, and Life would pay no more. However I begged at the evening when I counted my scanty store. For Life is a just employer, he gives you what you ask. But once you have set the wages, why, you must bear the task. I worked for a menial's hire, only to learn, dismayed, that any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have willingly paid.

We line our lives with beautiful things to create a cushion of stability: the illusion of a cohesive past, the promise of an unclouded future.

There is a love-hate relationship between New York and the rest of the country, but New York is unarguably the city that sets the standards, the city in which all who have anything to do with the arts dream of working and succeeding.

A learned woman is thought to be a comet that bodes mischief whenever it appears.

Every act of self control leads to a sense of self-respect.

Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way.

Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.

When photography was invented, people had to make room in their minds for the idea that the dead would always be visible.

The magnitude of this event (9/11) turned the world into a scary place. And perhaps the scariest part of all was that these terrorists believed they were doing God's work. They were trained to view life on earth as of no value and that no act, no matter how barbaric, was off-limits if in pursuit of jihadd.

The mists of nostalgia color memory.

Children are gleeful barbarians.

A lot of deaths feel sad. Philip Seymour Hoffman's feels like a robbery.

There's not much to know about me other than I like meeting artists and I like yakking.

Murder is a crime. Describing Murder is not. Sex is not a crime. Describing sex is.

It is ourselves we encounter whenever we invent fictions.

Nearly everyone wants at least one outstanding meal a day.

What if River Phoenix had lived?