Quotes by Critics - Page 17

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
George Bernard Shaw
When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.
Bonnie Greer
And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
George Orwell
In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!’ To which I reply ‘Well, why? It’s already a book.
Orson Scott Card
People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.
George Bernard Shaw
On Friday evening Martin and Mona went to the United Artists Theatre to see a film already being mentioned for the Academy award. It had three stars, ran a hundred and ten minutes, and bored them both to petrifaction. (In brief, the award was in the bag.)The Case of the Seven of Calvary
Anthony Boucher
When Walt became all wrapped up in the theme parks and live-action films, we tried to get him interested in animation again," recalls Frank Thomas, one of the Studio's "Nine Old
Charles Solomon
Since the earliest days of the art form, humans have been the most difficult characters to animate. The more realistic the human being, the more difficult the animation becomes. Audiences will accept distortions in the actions of a cartoony character: no one has ever seen a four-foot-tall rabbit walk on its hind legs, so an artist animating Bugs Bunny enjoys considerable freedom. But everyone knows how human beings move, and if those movements are not rendered accurately, viewers won't believe in the characters.Ward Kimball, one of Disney's "Nine Old Men," commented, "As long as we deal in fantasy, we are on safe ground. The eye has no basis for comparison. But the more we try to duplicate nature realistically, the tougher our job becomes. The audience compares what we draw with what it knows to be true. Any false movement is easily detected.
Charles Solomon
You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.
Hilary Mantel
Fun is essential to mastering the serious side of life. It provides the balance that keeps us sane
Peter Nicholls
The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
Renata Adler
Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.
William Deresiewicz
He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant. He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet. It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate. The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved.
Hilary Mantel
Love I never associated with the senses, it was not even passion that I wanted; it was a conscious, subtle, elaborate sensuality, which I knew not how to procure.
Arthur Symons
We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy.
Gail Caldwell
Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.
Orson Scott Card
Things perish. Gods have passed.But song sublimely castShall citadels outlast.
Théophile Gautier
I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!
Orson Scott Card
She had been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This mercy didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest 'Never!' I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials, had to take full in the face. I took it and was aware that with the hard blow the tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we sat and looked at each other; after which I slowly rose. I was wondering if some day she would accept me; but this was not what I brought out. I said as I smoothed my hat: 'I know what to think then. It's nothing!
Henry James
The solid earth sways like the treacherous sea beneath the feet of men and spirits alike when the innocent are slain in the name of law, and their wrongs are undone by slandering the pure of heart.
George Bernard Shaw
How many contradictions! Eh! If I loaded my wagon all on the same side, I'd tumble it over.
Rémy de Gourmont
It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.Pg.406
Hilary Mantel
Yoga is just gymnastics for uncoordinated people.
Claire Dederer
Our anxieties were driving us to become other people—he was Earner; I was Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play.
Claire Dederer
Jonathan's voice was quiet now. "Thank you for sharing this evening with me. In yoga, we say 'Namaste,' which means 'I bow to the divine in you.'" He bowed his dork-knobbed head and said, "Namaste." We bowed back and mumbled, "Namaste." On my tongue, the new word felt as though it contained its own foreign spice.
Claire Dederer
Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.
John Updike
Are you using me simply as a vulgar tool? Don't you care for me the least little bit? Let me suggest that for a girl in your-your ambiguous position, you are too proud, by several shades. Don't go back to Roger in a hurry! You're not the unspotted maiden you were but two short days ago. Who am I, what am I, to the people whose opinion you care for? A very low fellow, madam; and yet with me you've gone far to cast your lot. If you're not prepared to do more, you should have done less. Nora, Nora," he went on, breaking into a vein none the less revolting for being more ardent, "I confess I don't understand you! But the more you puzzle me the more you fascinate me; and the less you like me the more I love you. What has there been between you and Lawrence? Hang me if I can understand! Are you an angel of purity, or are you the most audacious of flirts?
Henry James
That's what Father and Mother are, thought Nafai. They stay together, not because of any gain, but because of the gift. Father doesn't stay with Mother because she is good for him, but rather because together they can do good for us, and for many others.
Orson Scott Card
The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt- sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: “Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now.
Hilary Mantel
Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.
Orson Scott Card
It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.
John Leonard
He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less.
George Orwell
The gift blesses the giver.
Hilary Mantel
Terrorism & tourism rhyme with each other. Yet they don't go well alongside despite some similiarities shared. If one booms it is doomsday to the other. It is sheer juxtaposition between the two lucrative industries in the city of the lights left in a sorry plight.
Indeewara Jayawardane
Even in the act of fleeing modern ideologies, however, literary theory reveals its often unconscious complicity with them, betraying its elitism, sexism or individualism in the very ‘aesthetic’ or ‘unpolitical’ language it finds natural to use of the literary text. It assumes, in the main, that at the centre of the world is the contemplative individual self, bowed over its book, striving to gain touch with experience, truth, reality, history or tradition. Other things matter too, of course — this individual is in personal relationship with others, and we are always much more than readers — but it is notable how often such individual consciousness, set in its small circle of relationships, ends up as the touchstone of all else. The further we move from the rich inwardness of the personal life, of which literature is the supreme exemplar, the more drab, mechanical and impersonal existence becomes. It is a view equivalent in the literary sphere to what has been called possessive individualism in the social realm, much as the former attitude may shudder at the latter: it reflects the values of a political system which subordinates the sociality of human life to solitary individual enterprise.
Terry Eagleton
Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
George Orwell
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
Chinua Achebe
Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.
Hilary Mantel
A womanly occupation means, practically, an occupation that a man disdains.
George Gissing
The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.
Renata Adler
We thought of [New York] as a free city, like one of those storied prewar tropical nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions.
Luc Sante
Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.
H.L. Mencken
The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.
Luc Sante
Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their little yards holding a fuchsia bush or a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin more livable than these stacked, stinking, ill-lit dens. He had been a part of the population then, a schoolboy immersed in its details of competition and expectation and childish collusion and hierarchy, alive in its struggle and too absorbed to judge or pity, whereas now he came upon it from outside, from above, as an agent of power and ownership, an enforcer and avenger, the representative of the system which squeezed the lowly by the same iron laws whereby it generation profits for the lucky and strong.
John Updike
Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar.
Kenneth Tynan
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
H.L. Mencken
Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.
Henry James
Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them.
Henry James
The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history.
Henry James
New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.
Ford Madox Ford
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
Henry James
You haven't lived until you died in New York.
Alexander Woollcott
What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.
Charles Whibley
Cricket to us was more than play,It was a worship in the summer sun.
Edmund Blunden
If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first.
Orson Scott Card
Then he took the pages, smoothed them with the palm of his hand, and fixed them with pins to the walls. So that now, if he sat looking down upon Grape Street, the letters and images encircled him. And it was while he sat here, scarcely moving, that he was in hell and no one knew it. At such times the future became so clear that it was as if he were remembering it, remembering it in place of the past which he could no longer describe. But there was in any case no future and no past, only the unspeakable misery of his own self.
Peter Ackroyd
Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
George Orwell
A few years ago, a taxi driver told me about a club & a dog. A waiter taught me a lesson about ladders today. Life is full of class sessions for those who have passion & listen.
Indeewara Jayawardane
He wrote very well in those days, as it happens, much better than he does now. He had absolute convictions, and style is nothing more than the absolute conviction of possessing a style.
Ricardo Piglia
One more drink and I'd have been under the host.
Dorothy Parker