A.O. Scott > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“A boxing movie without clichés is like a political campaign without lies.”
― A.O. Scott

“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

“...to be an American adult has always been to be a symbolic figure in someone else’s coming-of-age story. And that’s no way to live. It is a kind of moral death in a culture that claims youthful self-invention as the greatest value. We can now avoid this fate. The elevation of every individual’s inarguable likes and dislikes over formal critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan, has made children of us all. We have our favorite toys, books, movies, video games, songs, and we are as apt to turn to them for comfort as for challenge or enlightenment.”
― A. O. Scott

“Because the intimacy is extended to Sontag’s reader, the love story becomes an implicit ménage à trois. Each essay enacts the effort — the dialectic of struggle, doubt, ecstasy and letdown — to know another writer, and to make you know him, too. And, more deeply though also more discreetly, to know her.”
― A.O. Scott

“It was because I craved the drama of her ambivalence, the tenacity of her enthusiasm, the sting of her doubt. I read those books because I needed to be with her. Is it too much to say that I was in love with her? Who was she, anyway?”
― A.O. Scott

“But the rules of the game don’t simply dictate silence or obedience on the reader’s part. What sustains the bond — the bondage, if you’ll allow it — is its volatility. The dominant party is always vulnerable, the submissive party always capable of rebellion, resistance or outright refusal.”
― A.O. Scott