Quotes About Critics

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 a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

I am relatively familiar with getting a good old rumping from the critics. In some cases, the critics just didn't like the film - fair cop. Others, I think, didn't understand it.

I was at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards one year - they called me up when somebody canceled two days before the thing, and asked me to present some awards. So I went, and one of the funniest film moments I've ever had was when they introduced the New York film critics. They all stood up - motley isn't the word for that group. Everybody had some sort of vision problem, some sort of damage - I had to bury myself in my napkin.

The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak.

I think as you get older, you realize there's always going to be critics. Critics are going to win every time because they can change their critique based on the stats and their own personal feelings.

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.

My criticism hasn't necessarily been informed by the critics I've read. The conversations I've had with friends and fellow musicians have shaped my thinking more than the work of any critic.

We triggered a discussion in society about the connection between church and state as well as our justice system. Putin is the leader, the icon and the guarantor of an authoritarian system that crushes Kremlin critics along with the help of the secret police and ever changing methods and laws.

Every time I work out in the gym, every time I train, I know I'm going to do well. But I like surprising the fans, the critics, the people who doubt me.

Over and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, 'What is to become of painting if the critics withhold their lash?

What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.

What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.

I'm not a comedian. I can play off of people, but I'm not that guy. I don't want people being like, 'Yeah, he should have stuck with drama.' It would not be my choice to have critics mumbling that.

My play Safe Sex was picked apart because critics thought it was untrue. It was a play in which no one had AIDS, but the characters talked about how it was going to change their lives.

I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view.

To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty.

Critics have told me I've ruined the lives of 50 million young people. I can't be certain of this, since only about 10 million have ever come back to thank me.

Does it take a blanket presupposition for a historian to discount some miracle stories as legendary? No, because, as even Bultmann recognized, there is no problem accepting reports even of extraordinary things that we can still verify as occurring today, like faith healings and exorcisms. However you may wish to account for them, you can go to certain meetings and see scenes somewhat resembling those in the gospels. So it is by no means a matter of rejecting all miracle stories on principle. Biblical critics are not like the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

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.

I've had so many critics over the past couple of months. I've had so many people who said I'm too old for this, I am burnt out. But, you know what, I am so hungry to make a career for myself. I was able to turn all this negativity into something positive.

These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

I love to go to the movies with people, but a lot of the time it's me in a room with a bunch of other movie critics, which is fine.

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction.

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written

Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not critics to their judgment, too?

Critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.

If you really put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price. Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.

If I read or listened to critics of our music. I'd have been discouraged a long time ago.

There will be a competition among critics for the best Paris Hilton insult. Here's my first: Her attention span is so short that she can't even maintain her concentration while running away from a psycho... Maybe the ultimate insult is that she makes her co-star Elisha Cuthbert seem, by comparison, the sexiest and most interesting actress in modern cinema.

Critics called me 'egregious' - I had to look that one up - and 'creepy', but now I don't read them, I weigh them.

I think sometimes the critics want me to beat people down, and that's not in me. I want to lift people up.

It's over. The franchise is dead. The press killed it. Your magazine f**king killed it. New York Magazine. It's like all the critics got together and said, 'This franchise must die.' Because they all had the exact same review. It's like they didn't see the movie. Got any more gum?

I have heard the critics. What they are spewing are lies, nothing more. My defense policy calls for an efficient and strong military for our country. We live in dangerous times, but we must remember that we have to defend the United States against dangerous and modern threats. The Cold War is ending. Defense hawks like Senator Nunn need to understand this.

Well, I'm not a critic, I'm just a worker. So, I'm always grateful for anything the critics say - good or bad.

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

I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.

I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.

New York critics - I hear when one of them watched "A Star Is Born", he talked back to the screen.

The critics had an image of me, and they wouldn't accept any other... I was a cartoon character. A joke.

Music critics think of lyrics first and don't consider melody but so many songs are lyrically depressing but musically great, and that's why they become classics.

Silence is often the most eloquent answer to our critics.

I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.

You have to channel the interpretation and performance into 100 people. And with the audience, the critics.

Not as men of science , not as critics , not as philosophers , but as little children , shall we enter into the kingdom of heaven .

Somehow I wasn't completely crucified by the critics. I don't know how or why, I probably should've been.

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