Anthony Lane Quotes

#1. The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.

Anthony Lane

#2. Children, viewed from one angle, are philosophy in motion.

Anthony Lane

#3. That's the trouble with cookbooks. Like sex education and nuclear physics, they are founded on an illusion. They bespeak order, but they end in tears.

Anthony Lane

#4. The obvious precedent for Beijing 2008 was the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Both were showcases for a muscle-flexing nation, although Hitler made an elementary error when he chose not to dress his young National Socialists in lime-green catsuits laced with twinkling fairy lights.

Anthony Lane

#5. That is why the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics; all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive - books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all.

Anthony Lane

#6. So much to relish and remember.

Anthony Lane

#7. English fondness for France is normally a sort of neutron love: take away the people and leave the buildings standing.

Anthony Lane

#8. Youth is a clearer witness to the world.

Anthony Lane

#9. We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process.

Anthony Lane

#10. I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh.

Anthony Lane

#11. There is more suspense, more dramatic torque, in one page of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's heart-racked ruminations onthe Christian consciencethaninall Demi Moore's woodland gallops and horizontal barn dancing.

Anthony Lane

#12. Our age is so resolutely unheroic, and the employment opportunities for registered demigods are now so scarce, that all we can do, in our enfeebled state, is laugh with envy and disbelief at the memory of those who still had the wit and the wherewithal to live large.

Anthony Lane

#13. [W]e are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.

Anthony Lane

#14. No new reader, however charitable, could open "Fifty Shades of Grey," browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth.

Anthony Lane