Joseph Dennie Quotes

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.

There is less in this than meets the eye.

This industry is very make-believe and you caught in a false sense of what reality is.

The most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves.

We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States.

We are oftener deceived by being told some truth than no truth.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

When you are writing the kind of criticism you hope you're writing, everything depends on keeping your calm or your cool. You're trying to tell someone about something that they may know nothing about. They depend on you to read or interpret as best as you can.

No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

We praise or blame as one or the other affords more opportunity for exhibiting our power of judgement.

You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it for the reptile from whom it has been fabricated.

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

Criticism is not construction, it is observation.

A critic is a necessary evil, and criticism is an evil necessity.

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well; the chiefest part of which is to observe those excellencies which delight a reasonable reader.

There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling.

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

I’m not Thomas Jefferson. He was a pussy.

Critics, like the rest of mankind, are very frequently misled by interest.

Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.

His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That's when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn't even an angel, just a liar with wings.