Quotes About Critics

When critics love your film, you love critics. When they hate your film, you hate critics. It's the same everywhere, but maybe especially in France, where we have pretty good critics, except for three or four newspapers that are really dogmatic.

When critics ask you if you feel vindicated by other critics - I didn't like critics then, and I don't like them now. There you go. I've always been outside the mainstream, and it stayed that way.

Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'

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 something is broken that you can fix.

I relied mainly on other artists, who I think are smarter than critics, any critics or curators or anybody like that. They really know.

Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?

I think the harsh reviews helped, in that I spent way more energy in the preproduction and development. From this point of view, I'm very thankful for the harsh critics. I still think the critics were unnecessarily insulting in a lot of things, but I think it helped.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

I built my [early] career on negative reviews. There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square. They hated my movies. You could never have that happen today. Critics are way too hip.

You know, if I started worrying about what the critics think, I'd never make another comedy. You couldn't pick a less funny group than critics - you couldn't find a more bitter group of people!

Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.

I put all of my energy into building the game and giving women opportunities and, to put everything into it and then to be deemed selfish or not a good team player or outspoken, it's been hard. But at the same time, I'm going to get the critics and I know that.

The biggest critics of my books are the people who never read them.

The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

I've been among their critics [MBA programs]. Much of what I've seen in business schools is quite non-rigorous. Anecdotal histories are stretched to illustrate favored slogans. Evidence of their effectiveness is similarly anecdotal.

I see around 100 shows a month, going from Niketown-size palaces where you feel like yelling, to storefronts in Bushwick. Each has to pay the bills; keep artists happy; and cope with collectors (oy!), curators (ay-yi-yi), critics (woo-hoo!), and occasionally plumbers. That their fiscal life often hangs in the balance only adds to the energy.

If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less.

My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.

Some critics are stimulating in that they make you realise how you could do better, and those are valued.

The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.

I know all the critics.

I've got the public. I don't care about the critics. I did at one time. I don't any more. I did when I needed compliments. But if you get a lot of compliments, you don't need a critic to tell you, 'This should be done another way.'

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.

But I remember the morning after The Mask of Virtue-which is the first play I did at the West End-that some critics saw fit to be as foolish as to say that I was a great actress. And I thought, that was a foolish, wicked thing to say, because it put such an onus and such a responsibility onto me, which I simply wasn't able to carry. And it took me years to learn enough to live up to what they said-for those first notices. I find it so stupid. I remember the critic very well, and have never forgiven him.

When I was your age, art was a lonely thing: no galleries, no collecting, no critics, no money. We didn't have mentors. We didn't have parents. We were alone. But it was a great time, because we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.

Critics must excuse me if I compare them to certain animals called asses, who, by gnawing vines, originally taught the great advantage of pruning them.

I'd love to work on something that gets some type of critical respect. This business is sometimes so brutal - you work on something for months and really feel like the project is good and you're doing the best work you can, and then it just gets hammered by critics. It's such a bummer sometimes, because everything seems to build up to the release and a couple of bad reviews can make it seem like it was all a waste, which you know it wasn't.

Well, it's so cheesy to say but you can't find a comedy director who makes movies for critics. When a movie does $580 million worldwide, I'm not saying that proves anything except people were enjoying the experience.

It used to worry me what people said about me. I'm learning not to worry as much. Sometimes you feel critics are wrong all the time, but I don 't take objection to it, because that's the way it goes. They can be wrong, they can be right. They can be cruel, they can be kind.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Critics of Fox News have pointed out that Fox News does partisan propaganda, and there's ample evidence on a daily basis.

No one, though has to go to college to make or understand or enjoy art. Wonderful artists and critics - some of the best - have educated themselves.

The critics tend to forget their own answers after a while

The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we're not pure enough, good omens appear.

I don't have any special advice for America's women, except to know who you are and to put your priorities in order and to not worry about the naysayers and critics say.

We're not trying to entertain the critics ... I'll take my chances with the public.

Silence is often the most eloquent answer to our critics.

When I did the album Electric Circus, not only was it not commercially received. But even the critics and hip-hop community was like "What is this?" At that moment, I could've been written off. But I had to believe because I really love what I do. I'm passionate about it. If 12 million recognize it, that's beautiful. If 12,000 do, that's beautiful. But I'm always going to put my heart and soul in it and I'm going to shoot for the stars and go for the highest levels of recognition and creativity. I definitely doubted myself at the time. But it always come back to believing what I do.

I've written some poems that are in the middle ground - who are in between very challenging and abundantly clear, but there's a tremendous investment in the challenging poem, and it's been going on so long that the whole infrastructure supporting it, a lot of critics and theorists and so on are deeply invested in maintaining that status.

I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction, you're going to get bashed by critics.

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

I don't expect that the scientific community now embraces and kisses me 'Oh wonderful, great you did!' we have to live with critics, this is normal. Chariots of the Gods was full of speculation, I had 238 question marks. Nobody read the question mark. They always said: Mr. Von Daniken is saying... I did not say, I asked the questions, would that be a posibility? In Chariots of the Gods, I made clear difference between a speculations and facts.

Obviously all writers, all artists, have their own internal critics; as they write they are being self-critical.

[Sacrifice of Isaac] is a major theme of the so-called Elohist [one authorial strand in the Pentateuch]. It is marked by all of his linguistic characteristics, and so on. We cannot determine what is historical and what isn't. As literary critics, we would understand the importance of this for understanding life, destiny. But the historical question must be left with a question mark.

every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

I, along with the critics, have never taken myself very seriously.

All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don't feel an obligation to do that because I'm black.