Quotes About Critics

Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.

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 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.

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

Unfortunately, cinema critics are very few in America, 400-500 people, but there are more critics of Iran.

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

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.

Bonsai won the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006and it's easy to understand why.

If any human being earnestly desire to push on to new discoveries instead of just retaining and using the old; to win victories over Nature as a worker rather than over hostile critics as a disputant; to attain, in fact, clear and demonstrative knowlegde instead of attractive and probable theory; we invite him as a true son of Science to join our ranks.

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

I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.

Critics should stick to their convictions.

Reviewers and critics can be overly cynical. If something the least bit sentimental comes up, they'll often start flying off the handle. But I'm like, 'Wait a minute, you've had those times in your life. Everybody has.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Critics and fans use the music of their youth as reference points. For years, people seriously wondered who "the next Beatles" were going to be, and classic rock bands were the de facto yardstick for rock quality.

Do the thing itself. Don’t pay much mind to critics or what anyone says about it. Just do it, in any form possible, and watch others doing it. Take it in viscerally, get it by osmosis. Don’t ever read your own reviews, certainly not the good ones.

Critics are entitled to have an opinion, but how can they judge how comfortable a building is? No critic is smart enough to judge how a building will perform over time.

I've often been accused by critics of being myself on-screen. But being oneself is more difficult than you'd suppose.

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.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.

I'm too rich to care what the critics say.

I haven't seen the show, but when it was finished I felt good about what we had done. I don't know how it will stack up with Survival, but that'll be up to the critics.

The discipline of practice every day is essential. When I skip a day, I notice a difference in my playing. After two days, the critics notice, and after three days, so does the audience.

As far as I'm concerned, the 20th century was performance-driven, but for some reason, the critics and historians didn't know how to integrate that.

I am really inspired by writers, and weirdly - respect music journalists, which I think makes me the exception amongst most musicians. I think it's a craft. I think it's been really neglected - sadly. I think about the days of the great legendary rock critics. Who's going to become that when magazines and newspapers don't pay anyone properly or don't seem to respect the history or research that is required?

Critics have done the wine industry a lot of good overall.

Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.

Critics of Consequentialism have often assumed that hedonism (or preference-satisfaction) must be the theory of the good, that the deontic principle must be maximizing, and that the principle should be applied to individual acts. Indeed, this version is often called "classical utilitarianism" and attributed to Bentham and sometimes even to Mill. Rather than a "classical" view it is a recent construction foisted on to the tradition.

I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbach's sexuality), I use philosophical sources (but not in the way many Mann critics do, where the philosophical theses and concepts seem to be counters to be pushed around rather than ideas to be probed), and I use juxtapositions with other literary works (including Mann's other fiction) and with works of music.

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.

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.

We have gotten some terrible reviews at times but if we depended on the judgment of the studios or critics, we never would have made more than one movie.

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?

What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book.

If you write something and they all tell you it is bad - editors, critics, everybody - think it over and you may become convinced that they are right (though you are not to be ashamed or discouraged for a minute, but keep on writing).

When critics or art historians or curators ask me why I still paint, the answer is that I am not naive.

Critics should find meaningful work.

There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.

More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.

Some critics are emotionally desiccated, personally about as attractive as a year-old peach in a single girl's refrigerator.

There are no statues erected to critics.

the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.

Still, as much as I wish Ballistic Kiss could be a better film, the recognition it gained from critics and at festivals speaks for itself.

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

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.

Critics don't buy records. They get 'em free.