Quotes About Critique

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

I wouldn't want to criticise someone like Charlotte Church because she has done fantastically well, but personally I've always cared about the long term.

The thing we call critics are not really reviewers, they are not really critics. They don't have the discipline to write what we would term as critique - it's really just reviewers. They have a common man kind of taste. If you watch them overall, they are not different from the box-office. That's my view.

I find the whole Blairish idea more and more repugnant every day. 'New Labour': the term itself is so trashy. Kind of ersatz.

Most theatre is still really bad. It has to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives. Theatre about theatre is the most awful, terminal nonsense.

I've never seen a good tennis movie. They all were terrible.

My first album is like a terrible John Hammond album, with drums.

He asked me whether I had seen the movie 'The Color Purple.' I said no she hadn't. And Bobby said, 'Well, it's a terrible picture. They don't make good, decent, moral pictures nowadays.'

I have made a lot of movies, but I don't see any point in talking about films I don't think are terribly good. I have been in a few. I don't know any actor that hasn't.

Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with.

I think Dan Brown is a terribly bad writer, but he has cliff-hangers after every chapter which makes you continue reading.

'The Newsroom' is phenomenally bad good TV. Sam Waterston and Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer are all terrific! So is the production, and the direction, and even the editing!

Every piece of entertainment is made with the idea that 'This is going to be terrific' and 'This is the best thing I've ever done' and then it hits the public and then the public tells you whether it's good or bad.

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world?

American movies are the most popular movies everywhere, and it is true that the quality is far from uniformly terrific.

It's weird to take your work into a room and everybody reads it. Then comes the terror part, the dissection.

Holding auditions in front of an audience is testing.

You should neither play bad compositions, nor, unless compelled, listen to them.

The three books were The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker; and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat.

Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.

Sobre el mercado editorial, bueno, yo creo que es una estafa: un montón de analfabetos funcionales comprando libros de algunos necios. Lo que hoy se entiende por literatura o por mercado editorial es una estafa disfrazada de intenciones políticamente correctas. No tiene nada que ver con la literatura.

In other words: Allende's work is bad, but it's alive; it's anaemic, like a lot of Latin Americans, but it's alive. It won't live long, like many sick people, but for now it's alive. And there's always the possibility of a miracle.

As far as Aricimboldi was concerned, Isou was a 'Romanian fuck-stick.

Herein lies one of the book's many virtues: nationalists can't abide it. Its acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of the idiots who, upon reading it, feel an irresistible urge to string the author up in the town square. Truly, I know of no greater honor for a real writer.