Michiko Kakutani famous quotes

03-30-2025

The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.
-- Michiko Kakutani

#Art #Redemption #Crafts
As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read.
-- Michiko Kakutani

#Philosophical #Writing #Self
California belongs to Joan Didion. Not the California where everyone wears aviator sunglasses, owns a Jacuzzi and buys his clothes on Rodeo Drive. But California in the sense of the West. The old West where Manifest Destiny was an almost palpable notion that was somehow tied to the land and the climate and one's own family-an unspoken belief that was passed down to children in stories and sayings.
-- Michiko Kakutani

#Children #Destiny #Land
Mr. Robinson and Mr. Kovite have...written a captivating coming-of-age novel that is, by turns, funny and sad and elegiac -\-\ a novel that leaves us with some revealing snapshots of America, both at war and in denial, and some telling portraits of a couple of millennials trying to grope their way toward adulthood.
-- Michiko Kakutani

#Couple #War #America

As my poor father used to say In 1963, Once people start on all this Art Goodbye, moralitee! And what my father used to say Is good enough for me.
Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.
To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesnâ€™t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.
The Church's note must be a supernatural note which distinguishes incarnation from immanence, redemption from evolution, the Kingdom of God from mere spiritual process.
Forgetfulness leads to exile while remembrance is the secret of redemption.
We may not know who is craft beer but we sure as hell will know what is craft beer by who isn't.
I think of a plot, I think of an idea, and then I wonder, How can I get that onto the stage? . . . Whatever devices you use should always be there to serve the theme. If the theme has been overtaken by the device, then something's wrong.
To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.
If you have a great business, if you're great at your craft people should be coming in there. It shouldn't be this secret.
If somebody crafts an interesting tweet that'll lead me to their blog, I'm going to their blog.

Michiko Kakutani famous quotes

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