Critics Quotes

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

Without my protectionm your journey is doomed before you begin.' Great! I thought. Even the snake is a critic!

Literary critics make natural detectives.

You can be our critic. Would you dig that? (Yes, he was the last Man in America who could say “dig” with a straight face without referring to the process of using a tool to remove dirt from the ground.)

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.

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

I put all of my energy into building the game and giving women opportunities and, to put everything into it and then to be deemed selfish or not a good team player or outspoken, it's been hard. But at the same time, I'm going to get the critics and I know that.

The Canadian voice is still too rustic.

Encourage me, and I will not forget you.

I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise.

An over-readiness to criticise or to depreciate a minister of Christ is proof of a lack of devotion to Christ.

When you invent something, there will always be people to criticise. God's creation is full of critics, but has God given up His creation because of the critics?

My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.

Why will you be always sallying out to break lances with other people's wind-mills, when your own is not capable of grinding corn for the horse you ride?

[On The Waste Land:] Various critics have done me the honor to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

I think the answer has to do with the fact that [Louis D.] Brandeis was a consistent critic of bigness in business and in government.

Some people we define as trolls are just critics. Sometimes they have a point. And I hear them. But for the ones who comment "I want to kill you in your sleep," I respond to them too.

In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.

We triggered a discussion in society about the connection between church and state as well as our justice system. Putin is the leader, the icon and the guarantor of an authoritarian system that crushes Kremlin critics along with the help of the secret police and ever changing methods and laws.

Let's find and remedy all our weaknesses before our enemies get a chance to say a word. That is what Charles Darwin did. ...When Darwin completed the manuscript of his immortal book "The Origin Of Species" he realized that the publication of his revolutionary concept of creation would rock the intellectual and religious worlds. So he became his own critic and spent another 15 years checking his data, challenging his reasoning, and criticizing his conclusions.

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.

I love to go to the movies with people, but a lot of the time it's me in a room with a bunch of other movie critics, which is fine.

The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.

My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That’s why I didn’t study literature

Some artists respond to critics' questions about their art. I think Bob Dylan would alwys refuse to respond to questions of that sort, he always has.

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.'

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.

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. it does involve the belief that god loves man and for his sake became man and died.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Young people need models, not critics.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

So how critics will perceive your film or your work, or whether your movie is going to make $100 million at the box office, or whether you are going to be winning any awards - well, you have no control over that.

It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages, I am an ardent believer in the free market.

I am a Zionist, an ardent supporter of Israel, its defender when I deem Israel to be right and its critic when I deem it to be wrong.

Down through the years my face has been called a sour puss, a dead pan, a frozen face, The Great Stone Face, and, believe it or not, "a tragic mask." On the other hand that kindly critic, the late James Agee, described my face as ranking "almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype, it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful." I can't imagine what the great rail splitter's reaction would have been to this, though I sure was pleased.

I don't feel any real animosity towards critics when they write negative things. I think some are more perceptive than others. Some are very knowledgeable about painting. But it isn't something I have any influence over, so there isn't any point in worrying about it.

Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.

My play Safe Sex was picked apart because critics thought it was untrue. It was a play in which no one had AIDS, but the characters talked about how it was going to change their lives.

In December of 2002, the late Richard Corliss, a respected movie critic with a long and illustrious career, wrote an embarrassing letter of support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in the guise of a Time magazine review of Peter Jackson's The Two Towers.

I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view.

It's [Into the Badlands] something that's very, very different and I think that's why it divided critics initially because they didn't understand it or get it. They didn't understand or have a knowledge of what we were trying to do. Bringing in the Asian martial arts aesthetic to American television. For us, these are the people who will make the show a hit or a failure in future seasons. So it's for us to respect them and interact and see what they have to say.

I think that there is a purity aesthetic, like "I just make art because I'm an artist and I can't help it. I don't care what the critics say." But different mediums have a different relationship with the public. If you're in a performing medium it's hard not to place some weight on whether or not people come to your shows, or whether or not they're enjoying them.

It is not the critic who counts...The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

It is not the critic who counts

So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

My tough and grotesque images were thrown on the roads and were stepped on by my critics, and I was talked about with scorn. I felt regret that readers only seemed to like something they were accustomed to.