Critic Quotes

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.

I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.

The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.

The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.

Because I don't give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.

All over the web there are some very good critics and it's become for people who are interested. It's become a very good way to get to reviews and involve yourself in discussions.

A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.

You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can't change your mind, because God sure isn't going to change His.

If a movie isn't a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

I think that probably the - I don't give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn't have had my quote opening day.

I don't think Bush was legitimately elected President.

But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.

I'm kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That's fine with me.

Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can't give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.