A Quote by Clement Greenberg

It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling — or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste.

Clement Greenberg

Quote Topics

Anything Apparent Art Become Being Character Good Good Taste Impact Itself New Part Really Safe Saying Spectacular Startling Taste Without

Quote Author

Clement Greenberg
American - Essayist
January 16, 1909 - May 7, 1994

I spend several days at a time without enough sleep. At first, normal activities become annoying. When you are too tired to eat, you really need some sleep. A few days later, things become strange. Loud noises become louder and more startling, familiar sounds become unfamiliar, and life reinvents itself as a surrealist dream.

Henry Rollins

So the best marriages and the deepest relationships with God grow out of the startling discovery that there is nothing one can do to earn love, and even more startling, that there is also nothing one can do to unlearn it, or to keep oneself from being loved. This is a religious awakening that is utterly different from any other religious experience, no matter how profoundly spiritual it may seem.

Mike Mason

I always want to see films that are startling and amazing. Not just shocking. Shocking is easy to do. But startling in the way that makes you change how you think about things. Those are the movies I like the best.

John Waters

As any editor will tell you, startling newsroom revelations are generally met with queries about where the information came from and how the reporter got it. Seriously startling revelations are followed by the vetting of libel lawyers.

Graydon Carter

I have found in experiments, people become used to the robots. The less startling they become, the more commonplace they get. If these robots do become commonplace, then that uncanny effect will go away.

David Hanson

A friend of mine said that when Barack Obama was running for president, there was a whole generation of white kids who are used to looking up to a black person center stage speaking. And that's because of hip-hop. So there was no adjustment. A person of color in authority at times is very startling to people. But as time goes on, it becomes less startling.

George C. Wolfe

This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don’t really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you.

Marya Hornbacher

What made Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein such creative geniuses? It wasn't reading books or watching YouTube talks about How To Be More Creative, that's for sure... If startling insights could be systematically arrived at, they wouldn't be startling. The best you can do is to create a conducive environment: put in the hours; take time to daydream; avoid mind-corroding substances.

Oliver Burkeman

Our consciousness, a startling outgrowth of the universe, is possibly its most important part, the fraction of existence that can think, feel, marvel at itself.

Alan Moore

I remember being shocked when I came out from under the focusing cloth after a minute or two being submerged within that, at the startling green color of those ferns.

John Sexton

It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.

Hannah Arendt

I never said anything that was unprintable. Never said anything just for the sake of being startling.

Bette Davis

On one of my last days at school, the headmaster said I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. That was quite a startling prediction, but in some respects, he was right on both counts!