Quotes About Critics

People think I'm against critics because they are negative to my work. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is they didn't see the work. I have seen critics print stuff about stuff I cut out of the film before we ran it. So don't tell me about critics.

I would have been a lot more nervous if I would had known that Matthew McConaughey was [on 30th Annual Television Critics Association Awards] and Julia Louis-Dreyfus was there and all that, and I was like, "Wait a minute and Bryan Cranston's here..." I think I would have got more nervous. But I think thinking it was just like, "Oh yeah critics, we're good." It was great.

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.

I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.

Never surrender to cynicism, even if you suspect it would get the critics on your side.Never surrender to cynicism, even if you suspect it would get the critics on your side.

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.

Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Answer them critics with silence and indifference. It works better, I assure you, than anger and argument. . . .

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.

We need to have great wealth and we need to have the critics of great wealth.

No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.'

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.

We don't make movies for critics. I've done four movies; there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who've paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a paying audience.

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.

Critics ought never to be consulted, but while errors may yet be rectified or insipidity suppressed. But when the book has once been dismissed into the world, and can be no more retouched, I know not whether a very different conduct should not be prescribed, and whether firmness and spirit may not sometimes be of use to overpower arrogance and repel brutality.

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.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

Those of us and so many other stalwart critics and opponents and questioners and dissidents in conservative media were attacked for doing what those people in the mainstream media should have been doing. Do your job! Subject these political candidates to the same amount of scrutiny that you are now trying to compensate for with the incoming Trump administration!

I think we're going to transition with our comedy programming, trying to broaden the audience and broaden what the network does. Those Thursday comedies, which the critics love and we love, tend to be a bit more narrow than we'd ultimately like, as we go forward.

Critics say Internet advertising suffers from limitless inventory, which depresses prices. These exclusive front-page sponsorships are not limitless. If HBO doesn't move quickly enough, Showtime can buy out Gawker and Jezebel for the key fall TV season. On any individual day, there isn't room for both of them; and that's healthy.

I just think that the question of women in rock or women playing guitar, I just think it's such a non-issue, and I think that probably the sooner critics and press outlets can just erase the 'what's it like being a women in rock?' question from their vocabulary, the better off everyone will be.

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.

As I look back, I understand what [the record company] was getting at. They were trying to market a record and make it as commercially acceptable as possible. It hurt me and my credibility with critics.

You may not want to hear it, but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you, and want to make you better.

Stephen King writes mass fiction but gets reviewed by the New York Times and writes for the New Yorker. Critics say to me, "Shut up and enjoy your money," and I think, OK, I'll shut up and enjoy my money, but why does Stephen King get to enjoy his money and get reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review?

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.

Now see, a lot of critics are saying Arnold can't get elected because he's just an ambitious guy with a famous name, who doesn't know anything about running the government. Didn't hurt George Bush.

We all get to choose where we set up the stage of our lives - before the Crowds, the Court, the Congregation, the Critics (inner or otherwise)-- or the Cross of Christ. All except One will assess your performance. Only One will accept you before your performance ... Only in Jesus is there 100% acceptance before even 1% performance.

All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez's novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.

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

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'd love to work on something that gets some type of critical respect. This business is sometimes so brutal - you work on something for months and really feel like the project is good and you're doing the best work you can, and then it just gets hammered by critics. It's such a bummer sometimes, because everything seems to build up to the release and a couple of bad reviews can make it seem like it was all a waste, which you know it wasn't.

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

Everybody is going to have their critics. It's easy to get discouraged in life.

I have always been very fond of them (drama critics) . . . I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it.

I think it is important to do what you believe in and ignore the critics.

There's always been what I would call the William Carlos Williams strain, in which poems of simplicity and clarity are valued by a different community. I was talking to Galway Kinnell one day, and he said that there was an audience for poetry up until about 1920 and then, from that point on, the poets and the critics drifted.

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

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 make music to prove all the critics wrong. I do it to prove all my fans right.

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

Even the European critics... They said Hostel is the smartest film they'd seen on capitalism and how it's gone too far.

Critics? I love every bone in their heads.

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.

every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

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'm happy that people have loved my film and my work. I have always let my work do the talking, and I guess I have proved to my critics that I'm not over.

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.