Quotes About Critique

I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt's perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it's a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us. Lord, forgive me.

If she had been in a pointing competition, she would have lost points.

Interestingly, relatively few of my correspondents were of the variety familiar to most authors, the users of block capitals and red ink.

I am old and do not suffer fools gently and if you expect me to review your work, it better meet my stringent standards for logic and science.

I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

Don't give your money to the church. They should be giving their money to you.

Bullshit is truly the American soundtrack.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have just begun our gradual descent into the Indianapolis area, a descent similar in many ways to the gradual slide of the United States from a first-class world leader to an aggressive, third-rate debtor nation of overweight slobs, undereducated slob children and aimless elderly people who can't afford to buy medicine.

It's called the 'American dream' because you have to be asleep to believe it.

My interest in "issues" is merely to point out how badly we're doing, not to suggest a way we might do better. Don't confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in low they "ought to be.

What right have such men to represent Christianity—as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly?

Winning the Pulitzer is not that big a deal. I have seen hundreds of plays that have won the prize and you couldn't sit half way through it. The Pulitzer is a common prize that means very little.

Hollywood is a community that's so inbred, it's a wonder the children have any teeth.

The one part of the Wonder Woman' story that never really did much for me was Steve Trevor.

My most profound growth as a writer came when I joined an online critique group. What a harrowing, terrifying, wonderful experience that was.

One bites into the brass mouthpiece of his wooden cudgel, and the other blows his cheeks out on a French horn. Do you call that Art?

Look at 'Marienbad' honestly. What is it? It is just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork.

I grew up watching his movies; I know everyone did, but I really feel that a lot of my formative years were informed by Woody Allen films.

I'm not a big Woody Allen fan, but thought 'Husbands and Wives' was great.

You'd have a good voice, if it ever came out of your throat.

I could hardly sit through 'Frozen.' There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

I'm a big fan of a lot of prog music. As a record collector as well, I won't throw anybody or any band under the bus, but a lot of the records are fun to collect, are not necessarily very good. There are a lot of prog bands out there that it's a really cool record, but it's, like, not really there.

If Jesus came back today, I think he'd throw up.