Critic Quotes

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

His life was one long extravaganza, like living inside a Faberge egg.

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.

Harpo Marx looks like a musical comedy.

He had delusions of adequacy.

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

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.

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

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

Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others.

If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by my friends the murderers.

I gather from a lawyer that there was a rehearsal yesterday. We haven't a hope. I know the presiding judge too: I've had the misfortune to sleep with his wife. He was specially picked.

We can invent only with memory.

Uncertainty is the worst of all evils until the moment when reality makes us regret uncertainty.

Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous of the passions; it is the only one which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.

Happiness is composed of misfortunes avoided.

Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.

If men knew all that women think, they would be twenty times more audacious.

The more things change, the more they are the same.

Love in marriage should be the accomplishment of a beautiful dream, and not, as it too often is, the end.

Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses.

This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

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

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.'

It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.

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

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.