A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is... not happening.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The drama critic on your paper said my chablis-tinted hair was like a soft halo over wide set, inviting eyes, and my mouth, my mou...th was a lush tunnel through which golden notes came.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If he can't pretend that, he will look ...through the object, or round it, or above it or below it, or in any direction except into it. If, however, you force him to look into it, he will at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was asked to-night why I refuse to have truck with intellectuals after business hours. But of course I won't. 1. I am not an int...ellectual. Two minutes' talk with Aldous Huxley, William Glock, or any of the New Statesman crowd would expose me utterly. 2. I am too tired after my day's work to man the intellectual palisade. 3. When my work is finished I want to eat, drink, smoke, and relax. 4. I don't know very much, but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress, and am not interested in what anybody else thinks. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The art of the theater--notoriously an "impure" art--seems to be as close to the art of politics as it is to poetry, painting or m...usic. The theater artist, whether actor or playwright, depends on the interest and support of an audience, just as the politician depends upon his constituency. The politician cannot practice his art at all without a grant from his constituency; and so he must first of all woo it. And the theater artist cannot practice his art without real people assembled before a real stage; a theater without an audience is a contradiction in terms. That is why both politics and the theater are necessarily so close to the public mood and the public mind of their times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is easy to say that all things are both good and beautiful at once and that these qualities exist in nature simultaneously. It ...is not possible, however, to enjoy what is "good" about a thing and what is "beautiful" about it at the same moment. A pear is good: to know its goodness I must eat it. A pear may be beautiful: to know its beauty I must not eat it, I must resolutely refuse its goodness, I must let it alone. Goodness yields itself to use; the reason I am justified in calling a pear "good" is that when I do use it, when I eat it, it proves to be good for me. But in the process of eating it, of using it up, I am of course destroying all of the properties that enabled me to call it "beautiful."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »