Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.
I resist lists. It must be all those 'Most Important' and 'Best of the Year' ones I compiled in my years as a beat critic. I often felt guilty about what I left out.
Critics for established venues are vetted by editors; they usually demonstrate a certain objectivity; and they come with known backgrounds and specialized knowledge.
Larry David's armor is his dissatisfaction with the world down to the smallest detail, and up to the whole ghastly arrangement. He won't win, but he'll enjoy losing.
As any competent student of literary composition knows, the more natural and casual a voice sounds in print, the more likely it is to have been edited time and again.
A politics of vengeance is not politics. Revenge is a recklessness towards the future in a vain attempt to make the present abolish a suffering which is already past.
The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.
People should not feel intimidated by received wisdom. You have to discover it yourself. If I tell you that Armstrong is great, it's meaningless; you have to hear it.
The belief in a Divine education, open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by culture, supplements, and perfects it.
For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.
Would you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell? Or take your bodies honorless to Hell? In Heaven you have heard no marriage is, No white flesh tinder to your lecheries
Young people looking for adventure fiction now generally turn to fantasy, but for those of a certain age, the spy thriller has long been the escape reading of choice.
No matter how beautiful the paper, artwork, printing, and binding, I'm seldom drawn to a book unless it's by a writer I care about or on a subject that appeals to me.
People who've read my reviews know my tastes, know how I approach a book, know my background. I can write with believable authority. It doesn't mean I'm always right.
If you're looking for light entertainment, you can't get much lighter than 'Bye Bye Birdie,' a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n' roll to small-town America.
A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable.
We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out.
Developers need to start moving away from the entitled macho-male power fantasy in their games. They need to recognize that there are wider stories that they can tell.
Style consists in maintaining a convincing reality all through a piece. It's like wearing a garment that looks as if it might have been made for you even if it wasn't.
In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.
Although the 'New York Times' annually declares that Broadway is on its deathbed, news of its demise is greatly exaggerated. There's a lot of life yet in the old tart.
I like white wine when it's young and vigorous. I don't think you should cellar white wine at all, unless it's white Burgundy, and definitely not nonvintage Champagne.
A playwright who limits himself - or is limited - to a handful of characters is forced to concentrate on the essentials of the situation that he has chosen to portray.
No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit.
Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.
We must all face the fact that in a single lifetime we lead several simultaneous lives; our intention should be to make them reinforce one another instead of colliding.
People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.
There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labor. As matters stand, their only common interest is that of cutting each others throat.
It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.
Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones; Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss, The pieces kiss again, no end to this.
Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about.
My own particular feline companion answers, or rather doesn't answer, to Cinnamon. One of my kids must have given her the name, even though she's mostly gray and white.
The clergy earns its living from religion. If your interests are secured through religion, then you will defend your interests first, and religion will become secondary.
I wanted to make feminism more accessible. And I really wanted to engage with my own generation, one that is increasingly speaking in an audio/video multimedia language.
It isn't more light we need, it isn't more truth, and it isn't more scientific data. It is more Christ, more courage, more spiritual insight to act on the light we have.
Guy Rivers, a conventional piece as regards the love affair which makes a part of the plot, is a tale of deadly strife between the laws of Georgia and a fiendish bandit.
There is something distinguished about even his failures; they sink not trivially, but with a certain air of majesty, like a great ship, its flags flying, full of holes.
Born in 1910, Wilfrid Thesiger spent his childhood in Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, as it was then called, where his father was an important and much-admired British official.
It may seem hard to believe - unless you sit down and taste them - but some of the world's greatest sweet wines are made in the Rutherglen region of Victoria, Australia.
What feminism did was make clear for me how much I longed for clarity. I got married twice, each time in a fog. I had so many complicated feelings I couldn't understand.
The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads.
That is the thing that I was scared of - that I would know intellectually that there's something to glean out of life, but that I would be so broken that I wouldn't care.
I think it's true that people seemed to have had a kind of tunnel vision in my regard, and that has been something that I've been having to fight against for a long time.
When Elvis made his mass-media debut on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' - his notorious gyrations filmed only from the waist up - I fell off the family chaise longue with delight.
The words 'fairy tales' must accordingly be taken to include tales in which occurs something 'fairy,' something extraordinary - fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals.
London ... remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs.
Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.
I think, probably, socially, in some ways New York may be the least American city. It represents too many things that Americans really don't entirely want in their lives.
Through the survival of their children, happy parents are able to think calmly, and with a very practical affection, of a world in which they are to have no direct share.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.