Vincent Canby Quotes

Most movies were always terrible.

The cows in Stella Gibbons's immortal 'Cold Comfort Farm' are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on 'Ocean's Kingdom,' the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney.

Being dull and boring is far more tragic than being tacky.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.

Marry Ann; and at the end of a week you'll find no more inspiration in her than in a plate of muffins.

To be enthusiastic about doing much with human nature is a foolish business indeed; and, throwing himself into his work as he was doing, and expecting so much from it, would not the tide ebb as strongly as it was flowing? It is a rash game this setting our hearts on any future beyond what we have our own selves control over. Things do not walk as we settle with ourselves they ought to walk, and to hope is almost the correlative of to be disappointed.

I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be.

I miss working with my friends and the fun we had. Working on the series was the best time I ever had on a set. I am disappointed that they cancelled the series when they did, because I felt that by the seventh season, we were really hitting our stride, and that episodes were getting better and better. Some people say that the show had run its course and that it was time to quit, but I disagree.

To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.

If the world does not change course, we risk self-destruction.

What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

I'm a great self-doubter. I constantly need to prove myself to myself. I've never run to heroin or alcohol to hide that. I always have to deal with it. Stage fright is always going to be there. I have nightmares about bad gigs.

Do you know what it's like to run spellcheck for six hours? It's like a party in purgatory. A party in purgatory where all they have to drink is sugar-free Kool-aid, and the only game to play is Monopoly, and none of your friends show up.

The more you want, the more you stand to lose

My job is to make a film that can sit as a standalone piece, that if it's the only Marvel film you see, it's a great film with a great story in and of itself. The lucky thing is that there's a bunch of geniuses who run Marvel that make sure, even if it's a standalone piece, that it's part of a great big jigsaw puzzle that could be appreciated as a whole as well.

It's bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem-buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market.

Learning is to discover that something is possible. We are using most of our energies for self-destructiv e games, self-preventing games. We prevent ourselves from growing the very moment something unpleasant, something painful comes up. At that moment we become phobic, we run away, we desensitize ourselves. Neurotic suffering is suffering in imagination, suffering in fantasy.

Being young and trying to catch a glimpse of the depths, of the true self, of the soul, or whatever human beings have called it over the centuries, we often find ourselves surrounded by bossy, hectoring voices trying to short-circuit our personal experience by super-imposing their own disappointments. Much of this bossiness masquerades as an education.

When you lose your face..., it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.

Anybody who runs is a VC. Anybody who stands still is a well-disciplined VC.

When you see the way things deteriorate before your very eyes. Everything running down hill. It's kind of silly to even think about youth.

Most acts of assent require far more courage than most acts of protest, since courage is clearly a readiness to risk self-humiliation.

We should've been better, more disciplined. We made untimely mistakes defensively, as a group. This is really humbling for us. After winning the Stanley Cup, we got brought back down to earth, hard. Maybe the humbling is good for us in the long run.