Quotes About Critique

There is no place for a person like me in a world that only takes itself seriously. Satire is so necessary but fairly ineffective.

I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.

As an NFL analyst, my job was to watch countless hours of game film and critique NFL coaches and that's what I've been doing the last 10 years. And there are coaches that I question in the NFL, and at other big collegiate institutions.

Comedy has become, I think, a very important branch of public intellectualism. But it still ain't Washington.

I don't care about the bare fact that anyone liked or didn't like a book or movie; they can only interest me in that bare fact by writing an intelligent review.

When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.

Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their own internal editor just so they can get stuff out. So whether they believe it or not, they need me on the other end to do that editing for them.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

Oddly, Leon Stover, in Robert A. Heinlein, one of the best close readers in other ways, comes away with the idea that Heinlein 'defends the traditional ethics of Christian civilisation' (p. 61) which is a hard argument to make given the amount of out-of-wedlock sex in his work and the satirisation of so much Christian practice in Stranger in a Strange Land and Job.

Questa smania di dir sempre male del proprio paese non l'ho mai capita.»

Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you've made is worth the misery of having to review it.

Only the early Fitzgerald was great. Then came an orgy of brutal realism

Dónde íbamos? ¿En qué estábamos? Girando en redondo con su planeta Tierra y su país Colombia, Colombia la católica, apostólica y romana: venal, tramposa, envidiosa, secuestradora, traidora, mezquina, asesina, dañina, corrupta, impune, pirómana, ladrona, loca. En lo cual era injusto pues no fue Colombia la que decidió por él sino el destino. Colombia es corpórea, una tierra, un país; el destino, un viento fatuo.

cuando la humanidad se sienta en sus culos ante un televisor a ver veintidós adultos infantiles dándole patadas a un balón no hay esperanzas…

Pero las religiones de Cristo y de Mahoma no surgieron de la nada: provienen de la de Yavé, el Dios local de los judíos que fue el que creó el mundo en seis días. Y claro, con semejantes prisas así le quedó: un engendro chapucero.

Criticizing and objecting to everything means an attempt to destruction. If you do not like something, try to make something better than it. Being destructive causes ruins, while being constructive brings about prosperity.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose ...

To clarify Rear Window, I'd suggest this parable: The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses. And Hitchcock? He is the man we love to be hated by.

I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.

To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.

The Catholic Church, with the mental traumas it induced through repression and guilt, became a prime candidate for lampooning.

Spin it around, look at it from all sides, try to find a weak spot, if there was one.

Nous sommes si liés au monde du travail que nous ne voyons guère le mal qu'il nous fait. Il nous faut compter sur des observateurs venus d'autres âges ou d'autres cultures pour apprécier l'extrême gravité pathologique de notre situation présente.