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.

Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'

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.

Because Fox News is allegedly biased in favor of conservatives, critics whine like children whose lunch money got snatched. Conservatives have been pummeled for decades. Now that Fox News and conservative talk radio give people alternatives, critics squeal as if being sodomized.

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

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.

Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.

I certainly want to be involved in politics and help shape the transition. I am in contact with regime critics who had to leave for the West. One of them is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former businessman, who had to endure 10 years in a prison camp.

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.'

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.

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.

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less.

These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.

America's critics can be heard everywhere. It is too much in love with money - worshipping the god of the marketplace, the golden calf. It has too much money, seven of the top 10 banks, eight of the top 10 companies etc. It is too stingy, giving away less of its wealth than other countries. It is vulgar, a rich barbarian.

Some critics are stimulating in that they make you realise how you could do better, and those are valued.

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.

Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not critics to their judgment, too?

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world - they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.

The stones that critics hurl with harsh intent, a man may use to build his monument.

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.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

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

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 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.

It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

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.

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

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.

Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses.

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.

The critics tend to forget their own answers after a while

I don't make music to prove all the critics wrong. I do it to prove all my fans right.

I don't expect that the scientific community now embraces and kisses me 'Oh wonderful, great you did!' we have to live with critics, this is normal. Chariots of the Gods was full of speculation, I had 238 question marks. Nobody read the question mark. They always said: Mr. Von Daniken is saying... I did not say, I asked the questions, would that be a posibility? In Chariots of the Gods, I made clear difference between a speculations and facts.

When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed: 'Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!'

To me, a critic is someone who gets paid for their opinion, and they're entitled to that opinion but I don't really put a lot of stock into their opinion. I'm going to cut the kind of records and the kind of songs that I like, and the kind of things that I enjoy doing. If critics dig it, that's fine, if they don't, that's fine.

Critics? I love every bone in their heads.

Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.

Many critics speak about coming-of-age love, about initiation, about young libido, and so forth. I've never seen it only this way. We continue to examine things ever so minutely, we interpret obsessively. We may be less bold at 40 than we were at 17, but we're familiar with the road map; we know the bumps in the road; we recognize the sudden turns, the one-way streets, and the dead ends. And we are hurt just the same as when we were teenagers.

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.

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.

People have described me as a management bishop but I say to my critics, Jesus was a management expert too.

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

A leader must not let critics set the agenda.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

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.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden

Rather than focus on your critics, focus on the people who are impacted by your work.