5,882 quotes found
“People who are just getting seriously interested in film always ask a critic, Why don’t you talk about technique and 'the visuals' more? The answer is that American movie technique is generally mor...”
“The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn’t have much to do with art — the expressive use of techniques — it probably doesn’t have very much to do with actu...”
“Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials — which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures.”
“And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn’t need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn’t want to talk a...”
“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”
“Kicked in the ribs, the press says art when ouch would be more appropriate.”
“Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.”
“When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.”
“The small triumph of The Graduate was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdl...”
“The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it’s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they c...”
“The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.”
“One’s moviegoing tastes and habits change — I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with...”
“As a former soldier, what struck me is the absolutely heartless way that war was being pursued by the Americans, partly I think because of the race problem. The Vietnamese to us were not merely com...”
“I was very interested in the Great War, as it was called then, because it was the initial twentieth-century shock to European culture. By the time we got to the Second World War, everybody was more...”
“I'm a pacifist about certain things. I'm a pacifist in the way I define national interest. I use this example frequently: If the Mexicans decided to cross the Texas border with firearms, I would be...”
“One of my favorite quotes is from Hemingway, who said, Never persuade yourself that war, no matter how necessary, is not a crime. … It is. Sometimes it's necessary, but it's always awful, and that'...”
“[On war as ironic]: It's ironic because everybody believes that life is pleasurable, and they should. They have a right to believe that, especially if they're brought up under a Constitution that t...”
“After every war, there's an immense overhaul of language, which in the Western world has created really the cultural and artistic phenomenon of what we call modernism; that is, a paring down of eve...”
“One thing one can't help noticing is the efficacy of religion before the nineteenth century at dealing with these problems and answering some of these unanswerable questions. By the time of the Gre...”
“Irony is a great help in helping to penetrate fraudulent language. In the Second War especially, the language became virtually identical with the language of advertising. It was seen through by the...”
