Denby Quotes

#1. One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.

Tove Jansson

#2. The greatest all-around American film actor is James Stewart.

David Denby

#3. 188 Driven by fear, people run for security to mountains and forests, to sacred spots and shrines. 189 But none of these can be a safe refuge, because they cannot free the mind from fear. 190

Anonymous

#4. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.

David Denby

#5. A decade after an average athlete graduates, everyone will have forgotten when and where he played. But every time he speaks, everyone will know whether he was educated.

Theodore Hesburgh

#6. Will Trystan, the vampire's, pending orthodontia work hinder his lust for blood? Find out in my upcoming novel . . .

Arielle Hunter

#7. For many kids, a good teacher may be the most palpable form of honor they will ever experience.

David Denby

#8. Deception and 'con games' are a way of life in all species and throughout nature. Organisms that do not improve their ability to deceive - and to detect deception - are less apt to survive.

Harriet Lerner

#9. The action comes at us through a buzz of nattering remarks.

David Denby

#10. Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.

David Denby

#11. Discouragement is not from God.

Ignatius Of Loyola

#12. Writers fly with imaginary wings.

Melody Robinette

#13. Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, though it is not for the fainthearted.

David Denby

#14. Never throw fruit at someone who understands the theatrics of the situation better than you do.

David Denby

#15. Maybe it's the shadows that beckon, but I've created some of my nastiest work in the middle of the night.

Megan Denby

#16. Entertaining the reader is a good function.

David Denby

#17. The director, Antoine Fuqua, relies on small details, which anchor the vigilante-as-saint myth in at least a minimal degree of reality.

David Denby

#18. Used to put movies down by saying that they were 'deep on the surface'
meaning that there was nothing underneath.

David Denby

#19. Art talk is punk. Let the movie do your speaking for you.

David Denby

#20. I want to leave an album behind that is classic, that people in 50 years will refer to and pass on to their children. An album that you never bored of.

Adele

#21. The problem of criticism is not judgment but evocation - conveying the particular emotional and visual feel that the movie has.

David Denby

#22. Trivial details have been summoned, in part, to make a satirical point about upper-middle-class marriage-that the whole thing can slip away between the white wine and the arugula salad.

David Denby

#23. You don't have to know about ballet to enjoy it, all you have to do is look at it.

Edwin Denby

#24. Mi-yammi! The extraordinary city, with its Judeo-Cubano population, its mix of surgical-appliance and sex-fetishist obsessions, takes the American melting pot past the boil. It represents pretty much everything Patrick J. Buchanan hates.

David Denby

#25. I was shocked. A dying word, "shocked." Few people have been able to use it well since Claude Rains so famously said, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," as he pocketed his winnings in Casablanca. But it's the only word for excitement and alarm of this intensity.

David Denby

#26. Snark often functions as an enforcer of mediocrity and conformity. In its cozy knowingness, snark flatters you by assuming that you get the contemptuous joke. You've been admitted, or readmitted, to a club, though it may be the club of the second-rate.

David Denby

#27. But after children leave their parents' arms, school is still the necessary place for knowledge and soul to spring into life and good teachers are still the instigators of that miracle.

David Denby

#28. Mab Jones' poetry is suffused with a cool wit and a wisdom beyond her years. She is a superb performance poet in the tradition of Joolz Denby and Pam Ayres and, like them, her work is beautifully layered and contains bittersweet depths.

Phill Jupitus

#29. Wherever you go, madam, it will matter little what you carry. You will always carry your goodness.

Henry James