Quotes About Relevance

In city after city, newspaper after newspaper has diminished its staff of critics, sometimes to zero. Film and T.V. critics have been dropped and not replaced. Maybe they're deemed unnecessary because nobody cares if anything's good or not.

I had no idea that 'Less Than Zero' was going to be read by anyone outside of Los Angeles, and it's - believe me, as the writer of the book I'm somewhat amused and intrigued by the idea that 25 years later it's still out and people are still reading it.

I want people to get a better sense of who I am, whether they've seen every video or zero videos.

I remember that, one day, I was visiting one training center in the 1990s that was teaching people how to fix Volkswagen engines from the 1960s, which were no longer sold. So you were training people on a skill that had zero value. The reason is that they hadn't received any new equipment in 20 years.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

One trouble with growing older is that it gets progressively tougher to find a famous historical figure who didn't amount to much when he was your age.

One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself, to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask, including new ones they are just learning how to frame.

Literature is news that stays news.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

All children wear the sign: 'I want to be important NOW.' Many of our juvenile delinquency problems arise because nobody reads the sign.

Christianity, if false, is not important. If Christianity is true, however, it is of infinite importance. What it cannot be is moderately important.

Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

Every dogma has its day.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that others are behind the time.

The superfluous is very necessary.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

Share the passion and action of your time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object.

Every human being is trying to say something to others. Trying to cry out I am alive, notice me! Speak to me! Confirm that I am important, that I matter!

We accept every person in the world as that for which he gives himself out; only he must give himself out for something. We can put up with the unpleasant more easily than we can endure the insignificant.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

The point - the power to hurt - of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.