Art Critic Quotes

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.

People are incorrigibly themselves.

Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.

My father taught only math.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

Writing makes you more human.

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

We are most alive when we're in love.

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

All love comes from the family.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

The days are short,The sun a sparkHung thin betweenThe dark and dark.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.