American Critic Quotations

You need to have a redesign because familiarity breeds a kind of complacency.

Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them.

I think in conventional magazine wisdom, you need to have a redesign every decade or so.

Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

The nature of the task needs to be renewed so people just don't feel that all the hard work is in the same groove all the time, under the same circumstances and in the same environment.

It has an air about it of having strolled in from the street with a few tricks up its sleeve, and if everybody would relax, please, it would do its best to pass the time whimsically.

If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people.

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.

No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.

The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.

We'd rather see a picture that we liked then dump on one we didn't.

No publication is a staple of life. It's not bread and water. You have to make it noteworthy in people's minds and even in their hands as they're holding it.

We are drawn to our television sets each April the way we are drawn to the scene of an accident.

If it were better, it wouldn't be as good.

It fills one with a sense of architectural possibility.

After 27 years, I walked out of my first one a few months ago. Black Sheep with Chris Farley.

I've been asked about this constantly, and I compare it to how if you're walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and vomits on you: You wouldn't be hurt by that, you'd just think it's weird.

The most fatal illusion is the narrow point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

Most of them are pretty down records, pretty unhappy, pretty confused. Which only reflects how people in general were feeling, I mean really the sense that you get is society running down.

The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.

A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

It didn't seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn't know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

That's when it hit me. The site is more important than me.

At 83 Shaw's mind was perhaps not quite as good as it used to be, but it was still better than anyone else's.

People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

And doing so you can recreate yourself and you can also come up with something that is not only original and creative and artistic, but also maybe even decent, or moral if I can use words like that, or something that's like basically good.

I also did an Ozzy piece for him, and so I got hired. Everything happened really fast. I can't give people advice, because everything in my life changed completely in less than a year and it's still not something I am used to.

I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!

Here we are in the 70's when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse.

I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.

In Fargo, they say, well, that's a job. How well do you get paid? For example, for this book I was written about in Entertainment Weekly, and it was kind of cool because my mom asked me if Entertainment Weekly was a magazine or a newspaper.

What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.

No, I see it as meaning very little at the moment because none of the groups are about anything.

It's just that what's important there is different there than what's important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media.

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

Writers always know whether you like them or not.

What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way, which would clear the way for something better to come along.

There is no post-9/11. Everything from now until the end of time is post-9/11.

What this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.

There are some judges that in my view do cross the line. They try to make up the law as they go along. Those judges, in my view, respectfully, do not honor their oath. Their oath is to construe the law and follow the law the legislature enacts.

The production is great, the producers do a heck of a job. And, yes, it's fun doing the work. In the course, the economic payback isn't too bad either.

So it's a much more difficult issue to organize around, because you can't get media at all to make your case. And that's where cases tend to be made politically.

One survey that I saw that was published I think in Variety or Electronic Media within the last three weeks says that now the average hour of radio in the United States has 18 minutes of commercials.

One side, profits go up, they own more and more, but the diversity, interest, creativity and quality of the programming goes way down.

One should, therefore, in the interests of democracy itself seek to substitute the doctrine of the right man for the doctrine of the rights of man.

One of our federal judges said, not long ago, that what the American people need is ten per cent of thought and ninety per cent of action.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

My favorite line of fiction is from Raymond Carver's Gazebo: 'That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon, she tries to jump out the window. I go, Holly, this can't continue.'

On the other hand, every now and again somebody deserves a pat on the back and some compliment and some encouragement. I think you've got to do that, too.

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

I got to Spin because I put my phone number in the front of Fargo Rock City and one of the people who called me was David Byrne.

But the trick of holding off and having all the pieces come together at the moment of the revelation was something I must have learned quite early.

Basically what they're saying is, if you want to be on TV, if you want to be a credible candidate, you've got to buy ads. And if you're not buying ads, you're not a credible candidate, we don't cover you.

What I learned from this movie, 40 Days and 40 Nights: Absitenence can be a very good thing. Especially from box offices where this film is playing.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.

Well, you know, a lot of modern directors and their movies are influenced by the flat lighting and textbook cutting style of television.

Laws are changed all the time, but the legislature primarily makes the law.

Roger and I are now in our 20th year and I think people tune in because they know that for better or for worse, these are our opinions.

My new favorite talk show host in the world is Tyra Banks, who seems willing to do just about anything to herself in the name of attracting viewers.

Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.

Listening to Harry when he was at his best was like watching the game with your funny uncle, the one who used to play Double-A ball.

Maybe if you and ten of your friends could pool your savings and borrow some money and actually buy some obscure station in Sonoma, and then take some chances and have some fun.

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.

Well, I was a referee. I've since retired from that. I was a fighter and I took up refereeing as a hobby after I retired from being a competitive fighter. And see, I've got no nose.

Well, I think you've get to get people on the bench, and the police and people in law enforcement to recognize that we're all Americans. We're not black Americans, white Americans, red Americans: We're all Americans.

Well, I think, unfortunately, the application of the system sometimes is not fair. I think that's something that we have to work out - work at very, very, very hard.

You know, a left-winger, the barrier to success if you're on the left in commercial radio is a mile and a half higher than it is if you're on the right.

Well, judges take offense to that if they're called an activist judge. But the fact of the matter is if the shoe fits, you've got to put it on. There are judges that do that.

Yet it wasn't so long ago that virtually every person in the world felt perfectly free to show up on the doorstep of any other person in the world.

There are scenes here and effects here that would make George S. Patton wince.

The prevailing style in the mainstream is represented by Michael Bay. This is shorter and shorter takes and less and less dialogue.

When the government picked companies and gave them monopoly rights to frequencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, it was picking the winners of the competition; it wasn't setting the terms of the competition.

When the government allocates monopoly rights to frequency, and there are only a handful in each community, it's picking the winners in the competition.

But I wanted to make a claim: the claim here is that life is actually compelling and that Shakespeare's life is what he principally had to work with.

You can't believe Russell Crowe is the same actor who won an Oscar one year ago for Gladiator.

The public gets not one penny from them in return for those airwaves.

We will work closely with the prosecuting authority to ensure that those who have betrayed the trust of shareholders are charged.

And they've got to be held accountable; our broadcasting system has to be made accountable; and unless it is, it's going to be very hard to change anything else for the better in this country.

And understand that scarce spectrum is used today for example for cell phone operators, they have to pay for the airwaves they use, for their services.

Five years ago, I thought I was going to write for newspapers; if I worked really, really hard I could one day work for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.

The whole process of getting licenses to broadcast, which took place decades ago, was done behind closed doors by powerful lobbies, and wealthy commercial interests got all the licenses with no public input, no congressional input for that matter.

The studio should not have released this film.

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

Samuel L. Jackson is one of the best actors there is.

Our existing media system today is the direct result of government laws and subsidies that created it.

People take it for granted and they get to know all the different neighborhoods, and the impact of what's being provided can be lessened.

So the system we have in radio and television today is the direct result of government policies that have been made in our name, in the name of the people, on our behalf, but without our informed consent.

So the competition isn't once you got the license, running the station; it's getting the license.

A serious and composed young actress who won't let a line pass without making certain she's had it in for a private talk and perhaps tea.