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Quotes by Critic
"In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture."
"You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb."
"Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different."
"The short story is like an old friend who calls whenever he is in town. We are happy to hear from it; we casually fan the embers of past intimacies, and buy it lunch."
"Some of the characters in the story had a fortune in fantasy lives."
"Barack Obama is a truly flabbergasting President. And in a good way - not the way some of his predecessors were. He's not flabberghastly. He's not the student who wears a button that says, 'Smartest kid in class,' but clearly he is, at least when surrounded by the White House press corps."
"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window."
"He must not laugh at his own wheeze: a snuff box has no right to sneeze."
"Silly sitcoms are designed to attract juveniles of all ages."
"Sorrows cannot all be explained away in a life truly lived, grief and loss accumulate like possessions."
"Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors."
"It might be argued that genuine spontaneity is not really possible or desirable so long as printed scores of great works exist. All modern musicians are, for better or worse, prisoners of Gutenberg."
"There is something supremely reassuring about television; the worst is always yet to come."
"I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
"Commercials on television are similar to sex and taxes; the more talk there is about them, the less likely they are to be curbed."
"Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over except when they are different."
"We define ourselves, in part, by the discriminations we make. The value of what we love is enriched by our understanding of what we dislike."
"Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act."
""Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better."
"You need to have a redesign because familiarity breeds a kind of complacency."
"How it is that within 60 days of a general election issue, groups can no longer tell voters that a Member of Congress votes pro-abortion, against guns, against the environment or whatever else is beyond me."
"Judges were not the biggest issue for most voters in Georgia in 2002."
"The White House alone cannot hold its opponents accountable."
"Television is now the dominant factor in the lives of too many American children."
"Second, a quarter to a third of those who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are liberals."
"The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic."
"A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping."
"The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy."
"Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."
"It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it."
"The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal."
"With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin."
"English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind."
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