Critics Quote by Gary Giddins

“I never really wanted to be a daily critic who goes out every night and writes 300 word reviews, I wanted to write essays. And that gave me the luxury to be able to go out and if it was lousy, I could just say, well the hell with that, I'll go to hear something else, or, I'll go tomorrow night; I…” quote by Gary Giddins — Download Open image

“I never really wanted to be a daily critic who goes out every night and writes 300 word reviews, I wanted to write essays. And that gave me the luxury to be able to go out and if it was lousy, I could just say, well the hell with that, I'll go to hear something else, or, I'll go tomorrow night; I as writing for a weekly.”

Gary Giddins

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Even my colleagues don't read classic criticism. And my feeling is that if you don't do that then you're not really practicing your craft.…

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I'm a critic. That means you are a writer. So, yes, you have to make yourself an authority on whatever subject it's going to be. Music, movies, literature, whatever it's going to be, but what you really want to do is learn your trade by reading other writers. I think you have to read veraciously, especially people who have done…

Gary Giddins

You're writing for some version of yourself. You're writing the kinds of things that you like to read or wanted to read at a…

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One of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is…

Gary Giddins

Writing style is something is a consequence of who you are. I think that I had a certain propensity for a style that I recognize in my early work, but that doesn't mean I didn't have to learn certain basics and the longer you write the better you get. The rhythms come from you. If the rhythm seem to echo…

Gary Giddins

I think all of us begin as writers. I wanted to be a writer from the time I as eight, long before I heard of jazz. The question is, once you have that obsession, what is your subject going to be and you often don't know for some time. It might become fiction, it might be non-fiction, and if it's…

Gary Giddins

Humility is a very important trait in a critic.

Gary Giddins

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People should not feel intimidated by received wisdom. You have to discover it yourself. If I tell you that Armstrong is great, it's meaningless;…

Gary Giddins

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I hate the idea of turning jazz into homework assignments. I would never have a quiz saying, "Who's the clarinetist on the Hot Five?"…

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Jazz is for joy. It's for euphoria, it's for emotion, and anguish, and excitement, and all of the joys that great art can produce,…

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Bing Crosby said that Armstrong is "the beginning and the end of music in America," and he wasn't far wrong.

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Nobody knows where jazz is going, because nobody has ever known where jazz was going. I mean, you couldn't possibly predict the Swing Era…

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The worst advice? 'Don't listen to the critics.' I think that you really ought to listen to the critics, because sometimes they're telling you…

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Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But…

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I reject criticism because the last thing I wanted was to sit there and look at people talking. I think people are conditioned to…

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Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should…

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There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

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Capitalists have done more good for society through their charitable giving, philanthropy and generosity than all their critics combined.

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I get that the media wants us to play theater critics and critique every other proposal. What I'm focusing on are my own policy…

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The Yippies, their lifestyle is different from mine. But I consider Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman inspired critics of the kind of society that…

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This one goes out to all my critics: don't you feel stupid? Look how I did it. Look how it came to pass when…

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There's a lot of stuff I want to do, just things that I want to explore that don't involve show business. I'm going to…

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Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure…

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David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. But what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just…

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Critics Quote by Gary Giddins

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