Quotes from Brooks Atkinson

There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

The cult of nature is a form of patronage by people who have declared their materialistic independence from nature and do not have to struggle with nature every day of their lives.

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.

Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.

Writing is not an end in itself but life transmuted into radiance.

Everyone in daily life carries such a heavy mixed burden on his own conscience that he is reluctant to penalize those who have been caught.

Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.

Real art is illumination, it adds stature to life.

Say "Yes" to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say "Yes" to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say "Yes" to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.

There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.

Say "Yes" to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say "Yes" to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say "Yes" to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

This nation was built by men who took risks — pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, business men who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people.

Don't condescend to unskilled labor. Try it for half a day first.