If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?

At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.