Quotes About Critics

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!'

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.

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.

Have you ever noticed how most critics disagree with the public? That should tell you a lot about critics.

There were internal critics, sharp critics, who were very opposed to [Malcolm X], and who were very - some of them were members of Elijah Mohammad's family, such as Herbert Mohammad, Raymond Shareef, who was the head of the Fruit of Islam, the brother-in-law of - the son-in-law of Elijah Mohammad. They isolated Malcolm X and kept him out of the newspaper of the organization Mohammad Speaks for over a year, which is kind of curious.

You know, if I started worrying about what the critics think, I'd never make another comedy. You couldn't pick a less funny group than critics - you couldn't find a more bitter group of people!

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.

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.

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.

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

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

Many critics see international trade as a form of cultural imperialism that must be strictly controlled.

Every time you start a project, you're hopeful that the critics receive it warmly.

All critics should be assassinated.

Our loyalty lies with little taxpayers, not big spenders. What our critics really believe is that those in Washington know better how to spend your money than you, the people, do. But we're not going to let them do it, period.

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.

I'm praying for Barack Obama to stay on the tightrope because I want to fight his right-wing critics. I want to down I want to ensure they don't lie about him. I'm sure they don't demonize him, and too much of that is going on. So I don't want my critiques to be in any way confused with the right-wing critiques, even though I'll fight for the right wing to be wrong in that regard.

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

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.

There will be a competition among critics for the best Paris Hilton insult. Here's my first: Her attention span is so short that she can't even maintain her concentration while running away from a psycho... Maybe the ultimate insult is that she makes her co-star Elisha Cuthbert seem, by comparison, the sexiest and most interesting actress in modern cinema.

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

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

Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge.

I don't have any special advice for America's women, except to know who you are and to put your priorities in order and to not worry about the naysayers and critics say.

A few. . . critics are the only people I ever heard use the phrase 'imminent threat.' I didn't, the president didn't.

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

Critics often point to historical issues such as slavery, upon which many Christians did act inconsistently, in an effort to invalidate Christian participation in contemporary social issues.

The world looks very different to me now at twenty. I have outgrown my early opinions and ideals with my short dresses, just as Mrs. Walton said we would. Now the critics can say 'Thou waitest till thy woman's fingers wrought the best that lay within thy woman's heart.'

I don't know, I don't pay attention to critics anyway. They either like me or they don't, you know what I mean? I am too long in the tooth to worry about that.

Movies are hard work. The public doesn't see that. The critics don't see it. But they're a lot of work. A lot of work.

Critics of Donald Trump take him literally, but not seriously. His supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

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.

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.

Still, as much as I wish Ballistic Kiss could be a better film, the recognition it gained from critics and at festivals speaks for itself.

Malcolm's X objective was actually to reingratiate himself within the Nation of Islam, that because he had emerged by the early 1960s as a very prominent figure outside of the N.O.I., there were critics within the organization that were saying to the patriarch of the N.O.I., the Honorable Elijah Mohammad, that Malcolm planned to take over the organization, which was not true.

All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don't feel an obligation to do that because I'm black.

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.'

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.

The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.

I get that the media wants us to play theater critics and critique every other proposal. What I`m focusing on are my own policy proposals.

I'm in an odd place right now in New York where I routinely get trashed by every daily drama critic and have a few allies among weekly/monthly drama critics, and you sort of plot these things out and figure it out. But it's just what any writer goes through, periods of favor, periods of disfavor. And the trick is just to keep writing and to not let an obsession.

Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.

I don't know what the future may hold for me-or for any of us. But I want you to know that I am a man who likes having critics who are not enemies.

A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to hide.

[N]o scientist likes to be criticized. ... But you don't reply to critics: "Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. I'm very fond of it. It's done you no harm. Please don't attack it." That's not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste any neurons on what doesn't work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.