A Quote by Jean-Luc Godard
One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.
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I write and film history; I don't make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.
The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.
Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.
The detached observer's view is one window on the world.
It is necessary a writing critic should understand how to write. And though every writer is not bound to show himself in the capacity of critic, every writing critic is bound to show himself capable of being a writer; for if he be apparently impotent in this latter kind, he is to be denied all title or character in the other.
Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.
A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
Primo Levi's - I mean, he's a very different kind of writer. He's a much more formal writer. He's a much more -almost detached. I mean, I wouldn't really say that he's detached ultimately. But he does write as a scientist, and so he describes things very - in great detail, very carefully.
A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.
Being a good observer is a great tool to have as a writer, just taking the world in.
I don't consider myself a very good talker or writer but a pretty good filmmaker.
I am an Episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously, and I would, I think, be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up. I am also a critic of Christianity, if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.
Get up from your desk and wander outside occasionally. To be a good writer one needs to be a good observer, and there isn't a lot to be observed at desk level.
You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.
I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.
In a writer there must always be two people - the writer and the critic.
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