Quotes About 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.

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.

There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling.

I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.

If film critics could destroy a movie, Michael Bay and Adam Sandler would be working at Starbucks. If film critics could make a movie a hit, the Dardenne brothers would be courted by every studio in town.

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.

In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the '60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound.

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.

I can take a lot of pats on the back. I love it when I get admiring letters from people. And, of course, I'd love it if the critics would notice me, too.

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.

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!

As the book writer for one big smash and one big smelly flop, I always wondered if anyone knows just what goes into making a great musical. When a show is a hit, the critics trip over themselves not knowing who to laud and applaud the loudest. It's that marvelous score, those urbane lyrics, that irreplaceable star. But only when a show is a flop, does anyone notice the book writer. And then it's always our fault.

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

A rather ugly thing starts happening: the playwright finds himself knocked down for works that quite often are just as good or better than the works he's been praised for previously. And a lot of playwrights become confused by this and they start doing imitations of what they've done before, or they try to do something entirely different, in which case they get accused by the same critics of not doing what they used to do so well.

As a writer, its important to stay true to your story without giving a hoot about publishers, critics and readers. You should do your karma as an author the way you want to, and rest is up to God.

I've never had an easy relationship with critics. I hold a lot of homicide in my heart. If this was another time, I'd be packing a piece.

Last year I gave several lectures on "Intelligence and Musicality among Animals" ... Today I am going to speak to you about "Intelligence and Musicality among Critics" ... The subject is much the same, with some modifications, of course.

Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.

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.

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.

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.

There are good and bad critics like good or bad artists. A good critic says why they didn't like it. A bad critic gives it away that they don't like you as a person. I quite like that as well, because it means that I've won.

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

I have always noticed that when people consider others eccentric, it is because they are reveling in some form of enjoyment that their critics can neither compass nor share.

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.

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

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.

I never know who's influencing me at any time. I mean, I can take a play by Brecht and adapt it, I'm consciously adapting that play, or, as I've done with the Greek classics, Euripides and Oedipus, and I'm consciously adapting that play. Whether it influences me or not, I think it's the critics, the analysts who have to decide that. Me, I don't feel that I'm under the influence of any such sources.

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.

Most progressive critics don't want to destroy the power of the Fed to regulate the macroeconomy and finance. They want to regain control over it so that it better serves the interests of the whole population.

Of course there are critics who believe that no matter what we do, the Florida dream is over. They claim that we must accept the idea that inevitably our future is one of high taxes and big government.

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 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.

I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.

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).

In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.

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

[If critics of the Pledge of Allegiance persuaded the public it should be changed] then we could eliminate under God from the Pledge of Allegiance, that could be democratically done.

I get a great laugh from artists who ridicule the critics as parasites and artists manqués — sucha horrible joke. I can’t imagine a more perfect art form, a moreperfect career than criticism. I can’t imagine anything more valuableto do.

To be an actor you need various things. You need to have a head for choosing the roles. You have to be, hopefully, easy to work with so people enjoy working with you. You have to deal with missing roles, with not being asked to work, with doing good work and then being castigated by the critics for it. You have to have a skin that can deal with all of that. I, fortunately, seem to have the makeup which allows me to deal with the business. I mean, not as everybody.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

Those who closely watched the campaign should not be surprised by Obama’s hostility toward Israel, given his relations with pro-Palestinian, virulent critics of Israel and his voluntary membership in Reverend Wright’s decidedly anti-Semitic church. Furthermore, his campaign website featured anti-Semitic posts.

It was a movement that had all the art critics, all the museum directors in its thrall.

Music critics are, for the most part, bitter people who are intent at dragging people down for being successful at what they want to do, which is probably music. The oddity of being a critic is: You don't get a diploma, you just decide you're a critic. If someone listens to your opinion rather than their own, it's their mistake. Any critic's top 10, any year, it's something controversial or something that will make them look hipper-than-thou. The whole critic game, we've never played.

These critics with the illusions they've created about artists - it's like idol worship. They only like people when they're on their way up... I cannot be on the way up again.

Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.

In the end, all critics should be guided by this one principle: Is this piece of work [TV show, movie, play, concert, album, restaurant] succeeding at what it set out to do?