Will Self Quotes

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

The thing we call critics are not really reviewers, they are not really critics. They don't have the discipline to write what we would term as critique - it's really just reviewers. They have a common man kind of taste. If you watch them overall, they are not different from the box-office. That's my view.

I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts.

Dumbing down takes many forms: art that is good for you, museums that flatter you, universities that increase your self-esteem. Culture, after all, is really about you.

I wish theater criticism in this country could be more of a companion piece to the experience than a warning about where not to spend your money.

I guess you'd have to say that sometimes the audience is smarter than the critics.

I read magazines and reviews. If consensus says something is good, I'll get it and see what's going on.

I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.

I'm not cynical when it comes to things that are important. I'm cynical about pop culture and all that horseshit.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

It is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

A faith in culture is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from those very things which culture and religion are about. Culture as a collective name for certain very valuable activities is a permissible word; but culture hypostatized, set up on its own, made into a faith, a cause, a banner, a platform, is unendurable. For none of the activities in question cares a straw for that faith or cause. It is like a return to early Semitic religion where names themselves were regarded as powers.

Things are not to be judged good or bad merely because the public think so.

There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.

The critic roams through culture, looking for prey.

I've never thought of myself as a hoity-toity cultural critic.

what is popular need not necessarily be right or wise.

There are some readers who have never read an essay on taste; and if they take my advice they never will, for they can no more improve their taste by so doing than they could improve their appetite or digestion by studying a cookery-book.

As a critic, I try very hard to say exactly what I think. And in a medium in which we are well-known for the binary thumbs up and thumbs down, I try to be able to give the mixed review. But most pictures fall into that middle ground, so I wrestle over which way my thumb is going to turn. It's not flip.

To me, there's a huge difference between criticism and reviewing. I really love reading good criticism of television and film. To me, a critic is someone who analyzes a show, describes it, talks about the people in it, puts it in historical context of other shows like it, compares it and stuff, and then talks about the intent of the show and whether it failed or didn't.