Quote collection
138 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same."
"Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet."
"If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive."
"The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned."
"All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light."
"Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail."
"Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves."
"All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish."
"The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife."
"The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight."
"The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped."
"A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds."
"I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time."
"The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread."
"Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull."
"Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping."
"The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life."
"I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!"
"She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short."
"The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy."