David Edelstein Quotes
A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived).
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Quotes to Explore
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I'm a showgirl. After 20 years in show business, I've learned to roll with the punches.
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The team behind 'The Lego Movie' approached me. They wanted to do something extra special for the Academy Award performance of best song nominee 'Everything is Awesome.' They had seen my earlier version of a Lego Oscar statue, and I was happy to take on the challenge.
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I changed that system in Florida when I was the Speaker of the House - I was the Minority Leader; I saw for 16 years the way a power system works.
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My happiest moments of growing up in the Bronx were when my mom would bring home a new sports magazine from the candy store. I would jump out of bed and grab it from her. Then I'd rip the front cover right off and tape it to my bedroom wall.
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If you are going to make a change, don't go halfway. Make it with conviction and stick with your new idea. Ignore the scoffers. Remember, it is a law of nature that if something is different you're going to be taunted, jeered, and told the world is flat. Let the doubters fall off the edge.
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I went to boarding school from the age of eight - first to prep school, then to Eton. One thing that kind of education teaches you is community living: there's little retreat. That's why people come out of it and talk about lifelong friendships forged in the furnace.
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I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I'm going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.
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It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.
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The death of Churchill at 90 was one of those watershed moments in which the obituary rises to a special calling beyond the sharing of remembered times. It gave an older generation a rare opportunity to explain something of itself to its children.
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Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it.
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Golf is a puzzle without an answer. I've played the game for 40 years and I still haven't the slightest idea how to play.
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I have been absolutely hag-ridden with ambition. If I could wish to have anything in the world it would be to be free of ambition.
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I'm just interested in having a handle on my environment.
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You're in the public eye and you just hope that people don't come up and interrupt you while your in the middle of a meal or a conversation or something like that.
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As much as it might look like, to someone else, that I'm successful, I never feel like I'm anywhere. The further I go, I still feel equally further from my eventual goal. Because as I grow, I get more goals. I'm never content.
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At the same, we need to remain sensitive to the reality that we are still an African society in which the majority of the people and communities live under severe deprivations and afflictions that are no fault of theirs.
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What musicals need is a new me.
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Next to filmmaking and stuff like that, skiing is my favorite thing. I go skiing in Aspen - everywhere. I have been skiing since I was 4. I just love it. I feel so free.
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I'm only 26 - I don't know anything about life yet. Life is like a puzzle and my pieces are spread all over the world.
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I feel like, these days there's so much music and so many bands, that it's exciting to hear when people go through the whole process with their own sort of system of making the music. It gives it a much more personal individual feel, like unique feel, when somebody has a really idiosyncratic set-up, or they just have what might be considered strange ways of going about the process that yields results that are not just cookie-cutter sounds like everything else... and I think that can only be a positive thing.
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I think most Americans don't really care about politicians bickering in Washington.
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It was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.
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A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived).