Critic Quotes

It really is impossible not to like him. His success was his failure.

In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed.

If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema.

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

It is guaranteed to put all teeth on edge, including George Washington's, wherever they might be.

His acting remains forever fixed in a time that never dates.

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.

Arrogance, pedantry, and dogmatism; the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young.

The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

You must never aspire to 'finish' a house, you can merely hope to start it, and from then on it's an evolutionary process.

While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

That's one of the things about getting older isn't it? You suddenly realise that you are what you set out to be. And there are no role models any more.

Taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a style.

My wife and I both love cooking - I am an advanced male - so we argue about who gets to rustle up dinner.

It is sometimes easier to have furniture made than to find things.

In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.

If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.

I wouldn't mind someone lobbing hand grenades at me, but having to reset the timer on the video recorder puts me into a blood-spitting frenzy.

I just don't understand how you can not be concerned about your appearance. From time to time I'm vilified as the person who cares about the look of a teapot - and it's not that I believe my taste is superior , I just can not believe that other people don't care.

I have no particular interest in antiquities or antiques, but I like things to meet a certain aesthetic.

I have a character failing. I am quite incapable of identifying with anything whole-heartedly. Whatever I am doing, I am always planning to do something else. I would rather travel than arrive.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality.

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!

The New is not a fashion, it is a value.