Quotes About Critique

In the days of Caesar, kings had fools and jesters. Now network presidents have anchormen.

I condemn the national gay press for its emphasis on consumerism.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

Even at its height, 'The Daily Show' would do one great show a week, one pretty good show a week, and then two 'meh' ones. It was filler.

When you make 'The Daily Show', it's usually not for a laurel, it's for a dart.

To me, England is past its sell-by date. It's not the country I grew up in.

You know what makes me mad about 'The Bachelorette?' That, you know, that that chick would get a man. Get me a date.

The 'Dead' films allow me to talk about things that a drama, say, won't. 'Dawn Of The Dead,' which was set in a shopping mall, is on one level about consumerism; 'Land Of The Dead' is a response to Bush.

It's easy to say, 'I'm anti-capitalist,' or, 'I'm anti-Western decadence,' without having to be challenged about what that actually means, or how you might go about reshaping society to make it better.

My feeling about the movies is that most of them are terrible. If you don't have a decent script and a decent director, forget it.

If a movie has three decent scenes and a decent character, I think, 'OK, at least they got that guy right.'

I'm a better editorial cartoonist by default because so many editorial cartoonists out there are so awful.

Contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment shouldn't overgeneralize: the Enlightenment, however it is defined, is not an unalloyed good.

'Veep' is a great satire of democracy.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

I'm not sure what I think about current fashion, though. A few years ago, I would have said it's really, really bad and you hardly ever see anybody looking good. There must be some very good designers in the world.

In this way, some film schools can be destructive.

I guess I'm part of the art house, but we really have to shake up our ideas, because we're kind of self-parodying ourselves. We go places commercial cinema doesn't go, but sometimes it's to our own detriment.

I don't go back and read my own stuff too much, but there are times where I second-guess myself and said I could have done something different, like a line of dialogue.

I read 'The Rum Diary,' and I didn't really like it very much.

Henry Blodget does occasionally have a new idea. If you're making a point about aggregation or the emptiness of modern journalism, he's far from the best target. Try Huffpo - or Gawker writers whose souls have been corroded by irony.

I'm accused of, and perhaps rightly so, of not being mean enough. I've been taken to task in many a book review; a good satirist has to, you know, has to kill.

My mum and my dad have really good taste in movies. My gran would tape them off the TV and write notes about them, rating them.

Kudos to people who put themselves forward as the arbiters of taste.