Critics Quotes

Sometimes the critics will like a film, and the public doesn't come. Sometimes the critics won't like the film, and the public will come. It's completely spontaneous. It's a hazard. ~ Woody Allen

Historians and critics too often overlook the state of mind of the commanders in judging a military or naval action. ~ Tameichi Hara

Most critics of gender division are women, and they're worried about girls and the roles presented for them by gendered entertainments. They are quite right to be. Telling girls that the cars and the guns are beyond their domain of expertise, and that they should content themselves with clothes and friendships, is limiting. ~ Russell Smith

Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong ... This [is] mostly BS. ~ Jeffrey A. Miller

Still, Dionne asked Obama to respond to critics who say he tells young black Americans to examine how their own actions might have contributed to their disadvantaged status, in ways he wouldn't to white youth. The president said he made "no apologies" for it. "And the reason is, is because I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that," he said. "And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence, I think my daughters are better off. ~ Anonymous

The Bush administration tells us that the Iraq was was central to the Global War on Terror. Its critics call the Iraq War a distraction. The disagreement is a fundamental one. The Bush administration advocates a policy of preemption that calls for targeting terrorists and the regimes that support them, with the goal of eliminating threats before they are imminent. Their opponents disagree. The central question, then, is this: Would it have been possible to wage a serious Global War on Terror leaving the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in power? To answer it, we must consider what we knew before September 11 and what we knew before the Iraq War. ~ Stephen F. Hayes

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. ~ Oscar De La Hoya

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. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I don't read the critics. ~ Olivier Dahan

So many novelists of our time eschew any "message," as if it's an aesthetic flaw. Maybe critics want to preserve our self-defeatingly clamorous culture by making sure no radical idea actually gets through and can be heard. ~ Edmund White

Always be ready for criticism for there shall always be people who shall be ready always to criticize you. The positive lesson you learn from your critics, is the most important thing which matter and not just the matter! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics. ~ Bennett Miller

And you, my Critics! in the chequer'd shade,
Admire new light thro' holes yourselves have made. ~ Alexander Pope

Artistic prejudices are always the most difficult to root out. Critics - whose duty should be to see beyond the pretensions of artists and the public's passing fancies - often allow themselves to be persuaded by the way authors present their work, by what they say they have achieved, or else are guided by whatever has been a wild success - usually in order to take the opposing view - and which had been damningly labelled 'popular. ~ Javier Marias

Critics are eunuchs at a gang bang. ~ George Burns

The digital revolution has wrest a little control away from corporate publishers and white, male, middle-aged critics, but the financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession. ~ Sara Sheridan

The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. ~ Susan Sontag

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. ~ Harlan Ellison

In my whole career, in fact, I can remember only two first nights when a show was at its peak on the first night. And I just wish we could devise a system where critics came not on a single evening but were given a choice of performances to attend. ~ Richard McCabe

Why movie and dance critics are taking 'The Company' seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach? ~ Robert Gottlieb

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? ~ J.G. Holland

Small people have small minds, and thus deride big dreamers.
Small people have small hearts, and thus disparage big chancers.
Small people have small souls, and thus disdain big achievers. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

There are very few critics who have historical context or authority. ~ Twyla Tharp

You hear again and again that audiences want to see movies that are different, and critics say we make the same thing again and again in Hollywood, then you go and make something different, and you get kicked in the gut for it. ~ David Ayer

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded. ~ Paul Klee

My work is very much like the restaurant critic's - a number of factors come together to make for a strong review. ~ Hank Stuever

I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance. ~ Peter Schjeldahl

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The animadversions of critics are commonly such as may easily provoke the sedatest writer to some quickness of resentment and asperity of reply. ~ Samuel Johnson

Frank Fay turned into the most consistent stand-up comic of the late 1920s and essentially changed the art form. Crowds and critics eventually came to accept a man standing alone, cracking wise. No longer did Fay bill himself as a 'Nut Monologist. ~ Kliph Nesteroff

My early self-portraits appeared effortlessly and seemed like equivalents for my deeper emotions. Many critics remarked that the images had an almost other-worldly haunting presence. For me, they were simply my own reality at that point in my life. What I was trying to reveal was my inner soul in all its fragile complexity. Without knowing it, I was trying to peel back the layers that shroud and bind us all as we struggle to reveal our own authentic selves. ~ Joyce Tenneson

Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch. ~ Will Self

One of the most moving narratives of modern history is the story of how men and women languishing under various forms of oppression came to acquire, often at great personal cost, the sort of technical knowledge necessary for them to understand their own condition more deeply, and so acquire some of the theoretical armoury essential to change it ... There is no reason why literary critics should not turn to autobiography or anecdotalism, or simply slice up their texts and deliver them to their publishers in a cardboard box, if they are not so politically placed as to need emancipatory knowledge. ~ Terry Eagleton

You simply do not understand the human condition," said the robot.

Hah! Do you think you do, you conceited hunk of animated tin?"

Yes, I believe so, thanks ot my study of the authors, poets, and critics who devote their lives to the exploration and description of Man. Your Miss Forelle is a noble soul. Ever since I looked upon my first copy of that exquisitely sensitive literary quarterly she edits, I have failed to understand what she sees in you. To be sure," IZK-99 mused, "the relationship is not unlike that between the nun and the Diesel engine in Regret for Two Doves, but still… At any rate, if Miss Forelle has finally told you to go soak your censored head in expurgated wastes and then put the unprintable thing in an improbable place, I for one heartily approve.

Tunny, who was no mamma's boy - he had worked his way through college as a whale herder and bossed construction gangs on Mars - was so appalled by the robot's language that he could only whisper, "She did not. She said nothing of the sort."

I did not mean it literally," IZK-99 explained. "I was only quoting the renunciation scene in Gently Come Twilight. By Stichling, you know - almost as sensitive a writer as Brochet. ~ Poul Anderson

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

With a few exceptions, the critics of children's books are remarkably lenient souls ... Most of us assume there is something goodin every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory. ~ Katharine Sergeant Angell White

I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art. ~ Jerry Saltz

When a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime. ~ Charles Saatchi

I think I won't do for your business at all, but personally I have no fight with you. You can go on and save all the critics you can, but don't send them to me. ~ Frank Richard Stockton

His manner showed a curious mixture of longing and enthusiasm, which is to say that his enthusiasms were always of a wistful sort, and his longings, always enthusiastic. He was delighted by things of an improbable or impractical nature, which he sought out with the open-hearted gladness of a child at play. When he spoke, he did so originally, and with an idealistic agony that was enough to make all but the most rigid of his critics smile; when he was silent, one had the sense, watching him, that his imagination was nevertheless usefully occupied, for he often sighed, or nodded, as though in agreement with an interlocutor whom no one else could see. ~ Eleanor Catton

People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias. ~ Daniel C. Dennett

With the birth of the Internet, Clinton's critics began chronicling his
scandals - which were entirely ignored by the reliable mainstream press -
and even came up with a colorful term to describe the untidy truth that an
inordinate number of those connected to Bill or his wife, Hilary Rodham
Clinton, had met unnatural deaths - the Clinton Body Count. ~ Donald Jeffries

When I get passionate or worked up about an issue, I say things that the Conservatives and opponents and critics like to pounce on. ~ Justin Trudeau

Do the thing itself. Don't pay much mind to critics or what anyone says about it. Just do it, in any form possible, and watch others doing it. Take it in viscerally, get it by osmosis. Don't ever read your own reviews, certainly not the good ones. ~ Holland Taylor

Critics of American colleges typically attribute the failings of undergraduate education to a tendency on the part of professors to neglect their teaching to concentrate on research. In fact, the evidence does not support this thesis, except perhaps in major research universities. ~ Derek Bok

Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don't reply to critics, Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I'm very fond of it; it's done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. ~ Carl Sagan

In the '50s, critics used to say I had a 'dangerous' act. ~ Eartha Kitt

Critics must excuse me if I compare them to certain animals called asses, who, by gnawing vines, originally taught the great advantage of pruning them. ~ William Shenstone

But my later experience has taught me two lessons: first, that things are seen plainer after the events have occurred; second, that the most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticised. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived). ~ David Edelstein

Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin And there's no tellin' who That it's namin' For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin'. ~ Bob Dylan

A critic can serve as guide. I think there's an understanding amongst the public that critics have their own preferences and dislikes. ~ Michael Hersch

If I were silent and invisible, I'd fear nobody. And if I were tasteless too, not even the cannibals or modern art critics would touch me. ~ Jarod Kintz

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. ~ Jill Lepore

If I listened to my critics, I would still be at home under my bed right now. ~ Nancy Grace

IN MY SO-CALLED CAREER, I'VE OFTEN WRITTEN THINGS THAT I VAINLY THOUGHT WERE INCREDIBLY GOOD AND THAT I ENJOYED READING SO MUCH I FIGURED EVERYBODY ELSE WOULD ENJOY THEM TOO, AND MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, I HAVE BEEN TOTALLY WRONG … I never stopped being surprised that so many critics were uninterested in them, or dismissive, or even hostile. often they tried to point out the allegorical failures of the pieces, even when they were clearly as non-allegorical as they could get. and more than a couple of times, I received emails from somebody asking me what happened, why didn't I write the stories I used to write, and why did I get into all this 'animal rights' nonsense? I guess they thought I was picketing outside university research facilities. I consider all my stories and novels to be animal stories … I never understood why people took MFA degrees, or creative writing courses, and I avoided taking them myself for many years … honestly, I can't imagine why anybody would want to go through the pain and agony of having his work critiqued in an open forum - I tell my creative writing students this all the time, they are all far braver than I am! ~ Scott Bradfield

Those who do the least themselves are always the severest critics upon the noble achievements of others. ~ Elias Lyman Magoon

The 1980s: feminism, postmodernism, sexual/textual politics

While it might be tempting to generalise that Woolf 's writing was being discussed almost in two separate camps during the 1980s, formalists on the one hand, and feminists on the other, this would be to simplify things too far.
Many critics were attempting to make sense of and connect her feminist politics with her modernist practices. Such investigations coincided with the explosion of theory in literary studies, and once again the work of Virginia
Woolf was central to the framing of many of the major theoretical developments in literary critical engagements with feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In the context of the rise of 'high theory'
and the questioning of old-school Marxist, materialist, humanist and historicist literary theories, Woolf studies wrestled with the locating of her radical feminist politics in the avant-garde qualities of the text itself, and its endlessly transgressive play of signifiers, with the Woolfian inscription of radically deconstructed models of the self and of sexuality and jouissance. ~ Jane Goldman

The higher you rise, the smaller your enemies. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I'm my own biggest critic. I'm the one who has to go home and look at myself in the mirror. ~ Tony Gonzalez

[Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are 'one'? If so, his choice of metaphor - recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene - is fortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man? ~ James Shapiro

It is because the critics are not detached that they do not see this detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry light that they cannot see the difference between black and white. It is because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt that they have a motive for making out that all the white is dirty grey and the black not so black as it is painted. I do not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not in some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not in any way scientific. An iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope? ~ G.K. Chesterton

The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me ... People don't realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted. ~ Edouard Manet

Postmodernism has turned into this devil's vortex where no matter what you do, your neck will be turned and your face shoved into a foreign example, and worse, no matter what you say, despite the context, it will be considered a postmodern device. That's the danger of postmodernism: it poses itself as something that can't be trumped, something you can't escape. It continually mocks your efforts for the sake of its name. I know even this will be seen as another postmodern bullet, and no matter what I say, critics and readers will be locked into how to lock me in. ~ Brian Celio

You always feel like rock critics are frustrated musicians. I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment. ~ Todd Haynes

You know, the critics never change; I'm still getting the same notices I used to get as a child. They tell me I play very well for my age. ~ Mischa Elman

First, many critics are cowards. Not only do they snipe at lives that they are unwilling to live themselves, but they'll mouth off for years and never once have the courage to sit down with you, face to face, and tell you what they think. If you let them direct what you do, you are turning your life over to cowards. Second, ~ Eric Greitens

If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it. ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski

Writers, and the battery of critics, scholars, and publishers supporting them, would ignore or deny the commercial and symbolic interests which drive them, so involved are they in the literary game, and so accepting are they of its unspoken rules and premises (what Bourdieu calls the field's illusio). ~ John R.W. Speller

If criticism had any power to harm, the skunk would be extinct by now. ~ Fred Allen

Surely you do not think that criticism is like the answer to a sum. The richer the work of art the more diverse are the true interpretations. There is not one answer only, but many answers. I pity that book on which critics are agreed. It must be a very obvious and shallow production. ~ Oscar Wilde

People often seem surprised that I choose to write science fiction and fantasy - I think they expect a history professor to write historical fiction, or literary fiction, associating academia with the kinds of novels that academic lit critics prefer. But I feel that speculative fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is a lot more like the pre-modern literature I spend most of my time studying than most modern literature is. Ursula Le Guin has described speculative fiction authors as "realists of a larger reality" because we imagine other ways of being, alternatives to how people live now, different worlds, and raise questions about hope and change and possibilities that different worlds contain.

....

Writing for a more distant audience, authors tended to be speculative, using exotic perspectives, fantastic creatures, imaginary lands, allegories, prophecies, stories within stories, techniques which, like science fiction and fantasy, use alternatives rather than one reality in order to ask questions, not about the way things are, but about plural ways things have been and could be. Such works have an empathy across time, expecting and welcoming an audience as alien as the other worlds that they describe. When I read Voltaire responding to Francis Bacon, responding to Petrarch, responding to Boethius, responding to Seneca, responding to Plutarch, I want to respond to them too, to pass it on. So it makes sense to me to answer in the genre people ha ~ Ada Palmer

Critics of Fox News have pointed out that Fox News does partisan propaganda, and there's ample evidence on a daily basis. ~ David Shuster

Oh, I love critics. Because they love me. It's not a joke. They care. ~ Prince

It's funny to be a critic. ~ Leslie Fiedler

There is an odd assumption that compassion and care are finite or that critics can be everything to everyone - commenting on everything simply because they can. That's not what cultural criticism is. ~ Roxane Gay

I don't really think about the critics or the commercial success. ~ Jurnee Smollett

'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. ~ John Lahr

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition. ~ William Hazlitt

No Matter what you do there will be critics. ~ Woody Allen

I intensely dislike the word 'critic,' because it puts you in an antagonistic position to artists. I've learned everything that I know about art from artists ... I see myself as an advocate and an activist and a writer. ~ Lucy R. Lippard

unusual in the Roman period.2 In the eyes of many of that time, early Christianity was odd, bizarre, in some ways even dangerous. For one thing, it did not fit what "religion" was for people then. Indicative of this, Roman-era critics designated it as a perverse "superstition." Yet the very features of early Christianity that made it odd and objectionable in the ancient Roman setting have become now unquestioned assumptions about religion in much of the modern world. ~ Larry W. Hurtado

Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be made by anyone. It is cheap - and refills are free. Being largely without flavor, it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. The aesthetic satisfaction accessory to the beverage far outweighs its metabolic impact. It is not a drink; it is an artifact.

This contrast can stand for the differences between America and Europe - differences nowadays asserted with increased frequency and not a little acrimony on both sides of the Atlantic. The mutual criticisms are familiar. To American commentators Europe is 'stagnant.' Its workers, employers, and regulations lack the flexibility and adaptability of their U.S. counterparts. The costs of European social welfare payments and public services are 'unsustainable.' Europe's aging and 'cossetted' populations are underproductive and self-satisfied. In a globalized world, the 'European social model' is a doomed mirage. This conclusion is typically drawn even by 'liberal' American observers, who differ from conservative (and neoconservative) critics only in deriving no pleasure from it.

To a growing number of Europeans, however, it is America that is in trouble a ~ Tony Judt

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

The stereotype of the supercrip, in the eyes of its critics, represents a sort of overachieving, overdetermined self-enfreakment that distracts from the lived daily reality of most disabled people. ~ Jose Alaniz

Well, it's great that critics are comparing
me to Eminem, and not Vanilla Ice. ~ Uncle Kracker

Critics, in other words, idiots. ~ Marty Rubin

Bless your critics for their honesty. They do not criticize you to be a blessing to you, but the end product may be the same. ~ Calvin Miller

They're the best critics. Workshops are good, and drama teachers are fine, but the best is the audience. And even better if they're paying! ~ George Takei

I'll probably never put out another album because I'm a tough critic of my work, and I don't think I could come up to those standards any more. ~ Jo Stafford

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. ~ G.H. Hardy

The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. ~ Edward Abbey

I think the biggest challenge was being aware of a certain audience that was going to see this film [lone survivor]. There's a big difference from a typical movie, journalists and critics and film goers that go see it find that, that's the general experience you have as a filmmaker. So that just kind of proves my point that there's a really different audience. ~ Peter Berg

Marx and other social critics quipped, Western governments were becoming a capitalist trade union. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle. ~ Kurt Schwitters

It's easy to become very self-critical when you're an actor. Then you get critiqued by the critics. Whether you agree with them or not, people are passing judgment on you. ~ Keanu Reeves

Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties. ~ Pete Townshend

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled 'wrong'. ~ Raymond Smullyan

Outside the gates of the finca, watching the passing rows of tin-roofed shacks which represented the residential section of San Francisco de Paula, I began to think about The Old Man and the Sea, and I realized it was Ernest's counterattack against those who had assaulted him for Across the River. It was an absolutely perfect counterattack and I envisioned a row of snickering carpies bearing the likenesses of Dwight Macdonald and Louis Kronenberger and E.B. White, who in the midst of cackling, "Through! Washed Up! Kaput!" suddenly grab their groins and keel over. It is a rather elementary military axiom that he who attacks must anticipate the counterattack, but the critics, poor boys, would never make General Staff. As Ernest once said, "One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war. ~ A. E. Hotchner

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. ~ Oscar Wilde