“Enter late, leave early.”– advice to writers, origin unknown.
“The thing is, Morris dancing and incest aside, it’s hard to criticise something unless you’ve tried it.”
– Jay Rayner, restaurant critic, on his week-long vegan diet
“I said, ‘Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?’
Six seconds passed, and then he said, ‘It’s very simple. There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without A Country
“The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony — whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals — but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. We feel we should have rituals, we should do something about getting them and we blame the artists for not finding them for us. So the artist sometimes attempts to find new rituals with only his imagination as his source: he imitates the outer form of ceremonies, pagan or baroque, unfortunately adding his own trapping — the result is rarely convincing. And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.”
– Peter (Stephen Paul) Brook, theatre/film director