Quotes About Standards

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are.

Some things are so silly they have a certain brilliance to them. Other things, set as standards for brilliance and therefore exalted by many who don't know why, become tarnished because of it.

Throughout history, self-styled arbiters have taken it upon themselves to decide the question of what can or cannot be the legitimate purview of art.

It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.

I think music can definitely be art; I also think music can be crap and not be art.

Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.

What happens when an art form becomes ambiguous, I think, is that the standards are lowered. You can say anything is jazz. So I think it's important to reflect on what made jazz so special.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.

there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust

Only the mediocre artist is always at his best.

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.

I never wanted to settle for 'good enough.' I wanted 'great' or nothing.

And there are programs in every city designed to assist them to get off the streets, or so they say. But in truth only the most functional among the homeless are able to access these programs. Lines are endless, forms are impossible to decipher, qualifications can't be met, standards don't apply.

So it's all right for him to rule out a serious relationship, but it's wrong if I'm not ready to settle for less?

Your principles created the boundaries of your plan. You probably didn't consciously think about your principles regarding going out to dinner, but you thought within them: standards of food and service, affordability, convenience, and comfort all may have played a part. In any case, your purpose and principles were the defining impetus and boundaries of your planning.

You may want to begin by asking yourself, "What behavior might undermine what I'm doing, and how can I prevent it?" That will give you a good starting point for defining your standards.

The quality of our workflow management is only as good as the weakest link in this five-phase chain, so all the links must be integrated and supported with consistent standards.

He earned a national reputation managing large political campaigns, turning them into media-driven extravaganzas with emphasis on sound bites and perception over any kind of substance, and his win rate was astonishingly high. That probably said more for the gullibility of the modern voter than the high standards of the modern candidate, Michelle thought.

Self-Directed Shouldslead to feelings of guilt and inferiority when we don't live up to our self-imposed standards ("I shouldn't have screwed up!").

The quality of student work has definitely gone downhill since they discontinued the use of the whipping post. -Silk

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.