Quotes About Critics

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.

If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.

Doing what is right in the face of adversity is not always easy or popular. Critics may assail you, but the critics don't always realize what they don't know or don't understand, because they don't have access to all the information.

I relied mainly on other artists, who I think are smarter than critics, any critics or curators or anybody like that. They really know.

I am aware that many critics consider the conditions in the stars not sufficiently extreme . . . the stars are not hot enough. The critics lay themselves open to an obvious retort: we tell them to go and find a hotter place.

Someone has said that even criticism is better than silence. I don't agree to this. Criticism can be very harmful unless it comes from a master; and in spite of the fact that we have hundreds of critics these days, it is one of the most difficult of professions.

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

The more we refuse to buy into our inner critics - and our external ones too - the easier it will get to have confidence in our choices, and to feel comfortable with who we are.

I haven't got a great jazz band and I don't want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat's among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It's all in what you define as 'real jazz.' It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

Remind your critics when they say you don't have the expertise or experience to do something that an amateur built the ark and the experts built the Titanic

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

Those who live off of the donations of capitalism are often its greatest critics.

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.

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

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.

Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess.

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

But at 42, 1 don't care what critics think.

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.

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.

A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy for a role you're planning to leave. You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret you want future critics to say you played the character better.

I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together.

The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we're not pure enough, good omens appear.

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?

Critics or musicians who attack me are jealous of my success and the fact that I make people feel so happy.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Films are dreams. Many, many critics say to me that my films are not good because they are too unbelievable, but this is my style. I tell stories like they are dreams. This is my imagination. For me, it would be impossible to do a film that is so precise, that resembles real life.

No matter what happens, you're always going to have those critics and those haters. You just have to learn how to deal with that. I think I have and accept that.

Most of those who spend their lives as critics secretly wish they'd be considered important enough for someone to bother criticizing them.

[Sacrifice of Isaac] is a major theme of the so-called Elohist [one authorial strand in the Pentateuch]. It is marked by all of his linguistic characteristics, and so on. We cannot determine what is historical and what isn't. As literary critics, we would understand the importance of this for understanding life, destiny. But the historical question must be left with a question mark.

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

The way something looks or sounds is also what it means. Words as visual and aural phenomena, which mainly poets, not critics and prose writers, tend to be obsessed with. I think maybe I'm more of a curator than I am a writer in the strict sense because I am interested in how everything on the page, in a space, works together.

Apropos, is not the Scotch phrase 'Auld Lang Syne' exceedingly expressive? I shall give you the verses on the other sheet. The words of 'Auld Lang Syne' are good, but the music is an old air, the rudiments of the modern tune of that name. ... Dare to be honest and fear no labor. ... Opera is where a man gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. ... Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure thrill the deepest notes of woe. ... Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

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

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.

I can't hear the critics talking over the applause.

Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods. This makes them prone to set themselves up as critics and censors of the frail and erring human beings whose lot they share.

Nobody who knows me has ever thought I was a racist, bigot, all of this stuff. All of a sudden I'm on the radio and I become one, if you listen to liberal critics. I'm a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. I'm a hater and all of this stuff. I'm none of those things and never have been. It's all because of my political views.

[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.

Liberals cling to the idea that critics of welfare are motivated by greed or callous disregard for the less fortunate. In fact, during the twenty-five years that followed Lyndon Johnson's declaration of war on poverty, U.S. tax payers spent $3 trillion providing every conceivable support for the poor, the elderly, and the infirm. Private foundations spent scores of billions more, and private and religious charities even more. Nevertheless, as Ronald Raegan later quipped, 'in the war on poverty, poverty won.'

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

Many critics have become de facto teachers. That is a lot of responsibility, and I think it should be wielded with care. Most people appreciate sincere guidance.

Critics have a job to do. They do not criticize you without reason.

The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

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?

Quit worrying about what other people think and just be who God made you to be. If you will run your race, God will take care of your critics.

A man must serve his time to every trade, Save censure-critics all are ready made. Take hackney'd jokes from Miller, got by rote With just enough learning to misquote.