If you fight back and get hit, it hurts a little while; if you don’t fight back it hurts forever.

A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.

Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.

Tell him, on the contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent, or even actively resentful.

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they’re Americans.

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.

The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.

To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn’t read it the way you read history or science.

Writers always know whether you like them or not.

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

The Academy is paranoid about its image.

Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.

Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will...

I’ve had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn’t...

Maybe by his second year in Hogwarts, Harry Potter will learn the trick to making a movie this good, but don’t bet on it. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is...

All over the web there are some very good critics and it’s become for people who are interested. It’s become a very good way to get to reviews and involve yourself in discussions.

Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

The middlebrow, I hate.

Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

I think that probably the – I don’t give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn’t have had my quote opening day.

A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.

Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane.

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

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.

The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.

Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but...

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.

Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.

I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.

Real movie producers aren’t this nice.

And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don’t just try to shut them...

No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.

The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality.

I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.

The novel doesn’t come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste.

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is...

A gross and palpable error of the era that is just closing has been the confusion of mechanical and material progress with moral progress.

We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.