Better Living Through Criticism Quotes

“The cacophony in my head is completely unmanageable, and it's out of the failure to blend all those dissonant voices smoothly that whatever individuality I might have has managed to emerge. Imitation is the condition of originality. Or, to put it another way: imitation is the shortest route to and the truest test of proficiency. To mimic a master requires skill and practice, which become the sources of your own mastery.”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

“Taste, we assume, is innate, reflexive, immediate, involuntary, but we also speak of it as something to be acquired. It is a private, subjective matter, a badge of individual sovereignty, but at the same time a collectively held property, bundling us into clubs, cults, communities, and sociological stereotypes.”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. ERNEST:”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth

“Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. "Critical thinking" may be a ubiquitous educational slogan—a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood—but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant.”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

“The origin of criticism lies in an innocent, heartfelt kind of question, one that is far from simple and that carries enormous risk: Did you feel that? Was it good for you? Tell the truth.”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

“the essence of criticism is conversation - a passionate, rational argument about a shared experience”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

“This state of wondering paralysis cries out for criticism, which promises to sort through the glut, to assist in the formation of choices, to act as gatekeeper to our besieged sensoria.”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

“As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. Meanwhile, as citizens of the political commonwealth, we are conscripted into a polarized climate of ideological belligerence in which bluster too often substitutes for argument. There is no room for doubt and little time”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth

“It is always the Age of Iron, and the Golden Age is always behind us, giving off a luster that illuminates the terminal shabbiness of our present condition.”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

“As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. Meanwhile, as citizens of the political commonwealth, we are conscripted into a polarized climate of ideological belligerence in which bluster too often substitutes for argument. There”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth