Quotes About Critics

I don't focus on the critics. Everyone who is making any difference in any field has critics. As long as I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, then I don't worry about it.

The thing we call critics are not really reviewers, they are not really critics. They don't have the discipline to write what we would term as critique - it's really just reviewers. They have a common man kind of taste. If you watch them overall, they are not different from the box-office. That's my view.

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.

Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and gain delighted praise for the trenchant with of their review. But in criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a 'rant'.

Well, I think critics are very useful. But I think that they, in a way, betray their position when they stop people looking for themselves. Judgment is very easy, but I think, on the whole, professional critics maybe see too much, and compare too much, and forget the joy of actually looking and contemplating for its own sake.

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!

I find that the critics of voluntary service are all too often those who are prepared to accept such services when they require them but deride them with cynicism and scepticism when they see others helping and being helped.

A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.

Critics like to build you up, tear you down, and then, if you're lucky, build you up again.

What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.

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.

I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.

Don't spend all your time trying to win over your critics. Just run your own race.

I understand that artists and critics make a big deal over the Grammys. But when I go to my shows and I'm selling out arenas in London, and when I'm in Australia and Japan, there aren't any Grammys there. There are human beings who I've touched. There are human beings who are inspired by me, who I love dearly. And that's what my career is based on.

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.

Critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.

As far as critics, I'm not a hip guy. I was never on drugs. Nobody ever felt sorry for me 'cause I went straight or found God. I always had God. I've always like, played by the rules.

If critics and competitors can't match your results, they will often denigrate the way you achieve them. Fast, intuitive types are called lazy. Dedicated burners of the midnight oil are called obsessed. And while it's obviously not a bad idea to hear and consider the opinions of others, you should be suspicious when these criticisms emerge right on the heels of success.

American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically larger public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does.

Being a role model is the most powerful form of educating. Youngsters need good models more than they need critics. It's one of a parent's greatest responsibilities and opportunities.

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.

Critics don't really affect the fact that we live in this paradise and what the meaning of that [is]. And what luck to have this!

If a faultless poem could be produced, I am satisfied it would tire the critics themselves; and annoy the whole reading world with the spleen.

Some critics have written that I wanted to teach through singing. Not at all. I was learning I went to school every time I gave a song recital.

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a f@*$%load of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

When shallow critics denounce the profit motive inherent in our system of private enterprise, they ignore the fact that it is an economic support of every human right we possess and without it, all rights would disappear.

My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me

I knew that because of who I am, and the situation I'm in, that I'd attract more critics than your average person, and that was a little intimidating, but I wanted to get out there and pay my dues.

The devil's happy when the critics run you off.

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.

The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

I don't mind critics. I mean, I wrote for Rolling Stone for a hot minute. I like criticism. I enjoy criticism. The thing I don't like is cruelty for cruelty's sake. You don't have to be a jerk to say something negative. You can say something in the negative sense and have class.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

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

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.

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so

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

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.

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.

In contemporary society secular humanism has been singled out by critics and proponents alike as a position sharply distinguishable from any religious formulation. Religious fundamentalists in the United States have waged a campaign against secular humanism, claiming that it is a rival "religion" and seeking to root it out from American public life. Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy.

Critics of art are like eunuchs in harem. They see how it's done when the men come to see the women, but they can't do it themselves.

The word 'art' is very slippery. It really has no importance in relation to one's work. I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics.

There's a bait and switch going on here because the critics want the textbooks to question whether evolution occurred. And of course they don't because scientists don't question whether evolution occurred.

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

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.

Critics build nothing.