Eric Bentley

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so. Eric Bentley Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas. Eric Bentley Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps. Eric Bentley  

Walter Benjamin

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. Walter Benjamin Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who [...]

Clive Bell

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. Clive Bell A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in [...]

Vissarion Belinsky

Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge’they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely. Vissarion Belinsky I am strongly convinced that the people or society is the best and the most unerring critic. Vissarion Belinsky

Stephen Bayley

Taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a style. Stephen Bayley In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. [...]

Andre Bazin

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. Andre Bazin The “Western” is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself. Andre Bazin

Roland Barthes

To eat steak rare… represents both a nature and a morality. Roland Barthes What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth. Roland Barthes A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see. Roland Barthes Literature is the [...]

Lester Bangs

I mean Iggy and The Stooges first couple of albums I think sold twenty five thousand between the two of them you know and so to talk in terms of an underground I mean you have to go really to the independent labels and things like that. Lester Bangs The great thing about The Clash [...]

Irving Babbitt

Perhaps as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity – the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power. Irving Babbitt Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution. Irving Babbitt Since [...]

Thomas Gold Appleton

Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris. Thomas Gold Appleton A Boston man is the east wind made flesh. Thomas Gold Appleton

Vincent Canby

His acting remains forever fixed in a time that never dates. Vincent Canby Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives. Vincent Canby Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it [...]

M. H. Abrams

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves. M. H. Abrams We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior [...]