Quotes About Critique

At one level, an award is an endorsement, a confirmation, but I always find myself looking askance at awards and good reviews, as though another Garry Disher had earned them.

I didn't want to do 'Fashion Police' because I thought, 'This is stupid, this is beneath me, who wants to talk about fashion?' It has taken off. We are the number one show in England on E! Who knew?

I'm not a writer, but I'm very good at editing. That's my specialty. I can read something and tell you everything that's wrong with it and what's great about it and what needs to change, but it's hard for me to organize my thoughts.

Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction).

I don't think Indian actors are good. A couple of them are, like Anupam Kher, but not many are there like him in the industry. There are thousand of actors and actresses in the industry, but you can count on hand how many of them are really good; the rest of them are just pretty faces.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.

Open this book to a random page. With a pencil, mark any word or phrase that you think does not contribute to the meaning of a passage or chapter. 2. Pick another page. As an exercise, imagine that you have been assigned to cut 10 percent. Mark the candidates for deletion.

The Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

It's clever, but is it Art?

The problem with photography is that everybody can do it. Everybody has a camera and therefore everybody feels they can give advice.

To say that Agatha Christie's characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

If I am seen as a butch, or a man, I am now—to some minds—walking with someone who is under my protection and who is in my possession. Whatever critiques of gender and culture apply to that assumption, and they are numerous as the grains of sand, they do not always assert themselves in the walkaday world.

We've been hearing this for some time now — Save India from this, save it from that. The fact is that India needs to be saved from the people who say it should be saved.

Literature is a symptom of the state of a society

The intellect cannot laugh, it can only dissect.

But let's not forget the Jew. Anybody that gives even a just criticism of the Jew is instantly labeled anti-Semite. The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him. You can tell the truth about any minority in America, but make a true observation about the Jew, and if it doesn't 't pat him on the back, then he uses his grip on the news media to label you anti-Semite.

Das ist es, was ich an der mosaischen Religion nicht ertragen kann: ihre Weigerung und Unfähigkeit, unzählige seit Menschengedenken existierende, aber längst sinnlos gewordene Gebote und Vorschriften abzuschaffen oder zumindest zu reformieren. [...] Schon sehr früh, ich muß es unmißverständlich sagen, habe ich am Verstand jener gezweifelt, die derartige Gebote streng erfüllten.

Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement.

Some cheap do-it-yourself enlightenment handbook, Nirvana for halfwits.

He lacked the energy to work the crowd, he was fresh out of innocuous drivel... Saggy boobs, ran the thought balloon in his head. Bunfaced tofubrain. Thumbsucking posterboy. Fridgewoman. Sell his granny. Wobble-bummed bovine. Bladderheaded jerk.

Many of my contemporaries are atheists, and for good reasons. God isn't really the problem. Some of His followers are big assholes

These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

Whether or not you love television, you've got to admit that it certainly loves itself.