It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

The movie is a metaphor for the power of delusional hype--a metaphor for itself.

I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived).

Let me tell you, if your marriage is in trouble, skip the therapist and find a psycho. Nothing brings people together faster.

The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners.

Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.

Russell Crowe is normally an actor who disappears so far into his characters you'd swear his DNA has been altered.

Some reviewed 'The Master' on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.

The movie's only serious criticism is reserved for Baker's television network, which doesn't think Americans care about Afghanistan - kind of hypocritical given this film's lack of substance.

I have a female colleague who gets annoyed that Tina Fey seems to go out of her way in her movies to deride her looks, as if she weren't such an attractive woman.

You're going to make the new friend impressedif you keep remember her when she'd forgotten.

History is too slow for our life, for our hearts.

It's a big change for a country boy like me, to be in the limelight in New York City. It was most definitely a tough adjustment.

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

Traveling isn't something you're good at. It's something you do. Like breathing.

In general, women desire to rule over their husbands and lovers, to be the authority above them.

That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?

Total relaxation is the secret to enjoying sitting meditation. I sit with my spine upright, but not rigid; and I relax all the muscles in my body.

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.

My own perception was that although it kind of sucks to be stuck in a contract you signed a long time ago, when you're having success, it gives you some leverage.