Quotes About Critics

If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.

To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, It is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.

Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them.

Have you ever noticed how most critics disagree with the public? That should tell you a lot about critics.

When you invent something, there will always be people to criticise. God's creation is full of critics, but has God given up His creation because of the critics?

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!

I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.

I have learned not to read reviews. Period. And I hate reviewers. All of them, or at least all but two or three. Life is much simpler ignoring reviews and the nasty people who write them. Critics should find meaningful work.

Most men I know adore women, and I am including gay men. I think studies on jury selection show that the biggest critics of women - people less likely to trust their character or judgment - are women.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

I don't like it when they [media critics] see me as this little person who doesn't know what to do with herself -- like I have no idea what I want, like I'm just a puppet ... That's demeaning to me, because that ain't how it is, and it never was.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

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.

The world still awaits a proper inquiry into climategate: one that is not stacked with global warming advocates and one that is prepared to cross-examine evidence, interview critics as well as supporters of the CRU and other IPCC players, and follow the evidence where it clearly leads.

I could never do a show, or be a personality like Howard Stern, where you take all that heat from critics. What he does, he does, but the critical heat would crucify me.

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.

To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.

I know that a ridiculous number of classic serials have been commissioned, and that reviews show a reaction against them. The critics seem fed up.

If critics want to help me, let them come sit next to me while I'm writing.

We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men!

Money drives the world, but when everything falls apart to leave the underpinnings of our life bare to the scrutiny of critics and thieves, the only thing remaining, the only thing that can't be taken away, is the love you hold for the people you care about.

Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.

Honey, I am the chief of my train. If critics want to hop on board, fantastic. There's plenty of room. The KP train is fun.

Some Critics on the Hearth are not only good-natured, but have rather too high, or, if that is impossible, let us say too pronounced, an opinion of the abilities of their literary friends.

Theatres, actors, critics and public are interlocked in a machine that creaks but never stops. There is always a new season in hand and we are to busy to ask the only vital question which measures the whole structure. Why theatre at all? What for? Is it an anachronism, a superannuated oddity? Surviving like an old monument or a quaint custom? Why do we applaud and what? Has the stage a real place in our lives? What function can it have? What could it serve? What could it explore? What are its special properties?

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.

I get out my work and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it-how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that, the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.

I've always felt if my nose were more crooked, critics would focus more on my acting.

I really think there's a difference between how men critics see things than how women tend to. And I don't want to make that - it's not a generality and I don't want to say that, but I just feel - I know I do the same thing. There are certain things that I just am not that interested in. Certain kinds of films - I just don't enter them.

It is a shame to see in the work of an artist the limitations of his critics.

You can't make your choices based on what critics think. You have to make your choices based on what's honest for you.

I have been in a lot of movies, but none of them are critics' darlings, you might say.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

No matter what you do next, the world needs your energy, your passion, your impatience for progress. Don't shrink from risk. And tune out those critics and cynics. History rarely yields to one person, but think, and never forget, what happens when it does. That can be you. That should be you. That must be you.

Critics say the OWS protesters hate the rich. Come on! Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning - they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

I wish all critics, no matter their color, were more sophisticated when it comes to the moral questions a film like 'St. Anna' is trying to raise.

The critics. When they're right, they're right for the wrong reasons. And they're usually wrong.

The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.

Critics have a job to do. They do not criticize you without reason.

It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.

What I resist is techniques. I find techniques very problematic. So when critics talk about my work in those terms, I find that they miss the condition. I am comfortable with the notion of pattern and ornament as a system of organization, [but] for me it acts as a textile. So it's not about pattern, but the notion of architecture through the lens of textile, rather than architecture through the lens of brick and mortar.

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

If I depended on critics and children to make a living I'd grow broke.

Let the critics criticize and let the doers do.

The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics of the New Testament affect no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice