33 Quotes by David Denby

If you don't read books, and if you don't get consumed by the physical and moral life of men and women in fiction and history, too many facets of yourself may never come into being.

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.

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.

The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is that they don't go far enough; they don't have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don't stand for anything, push for anything; they're mere opportunists without dedication, and they don't win any victories.

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

Just because a book is a classic doesn't mean it has anything to do with real life. Homer's ILIAD is taught at Columbia precisely because most Columbia professors have never seen combat. Daily life on the Columbia Campus involves no bloodshed, no sacrifice, and no possibility of recognition. Indeed, for most college students daily life is less like Homer's ILIAD and more like THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Larry McMurtry. But who wants to read a book set in Texas?

Snark is what people on the inside call any attempt at protest from people on the outside. I hate it on principle, as do all Columbia professors, Catholic priests, and Mississippi Klansmen.

Entertaining the reader is a good function.

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.