Critic Quotes & Sayings

Well, I do expect a lot of myself. I'm a harsh critic because I know what I'm capable of. I have hit those occasional peaks amongst the valleys, but the peaks are so few-things like genuine flashes of virtuoso brush inking, like I've never executed before or since-I can count on one hand the number of jobs where I've been able to hit that mark. The same with penciling. Sometimes it just flows, but more often than not, it's pure physical and spiritual torment just to get something decent on paper. I often get very discouraged with the whole creative process. — Dave Stevens

Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye. — Douglas Sirk

You have an internal critic, an internal drive that says, 'OK, you can do more.' Maybe that's what keeps you going. — Robin Williams

It's sweet. Passionate. Appealing to the senses." Andy sounded serious, like a true critic. "Have you thought of majoring in literature? — Nely Cab

Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and 'free spirit' and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One critic in the L.A. Times said John Kerry looks like he is thinking too much. Well this is one place President Bush has him beat. — Jay Leno

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

A sweeping statement is the only statement worth listening to. The critic without faith gives balanced opinions, usually about second-rate writers. — Patrick Kavanagh

The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect
even if rejected
enrich and enlarge one's view of existence. Deadlier still, to the artist who lacks models, is the curse of ridicule, the bringing to bear on an artist's best work, especially his or her most original, most strikingly deviant, only a fund of ignorance and the presumption that as an artist's critic one's judgement is free of the restrictions imposed by prejudice, and is well informed, indeed, about all the art in the world that really matters. — Alice Walker

Nobody else can be a better critic of yours than your enemy, who hates you to the core.
He will speculate your work minutely to find out your mistakes to let you down, the more he lets you down, the more you will excel.
And your true victory will be the day he praises your work.
The only condition is, you have to be negatively positive and positively negative to provide the comments and compliments, a space in your heart and mind, respectively. — Himmilicious

The critic is beneath the maker, but is his needed friend. The critic is not a base caviler, but the younger brother of genius. Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. And of making others appreciate it ... — Margaret Fuller

As a director, you have to go in with a really, really, really clear picture of what you want. That's the point of my commentaries. It's so difficult because you're the harshest critic. — David Slade

The critic's aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and help readers appreciate it, by defining and analysing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of visions from which its beauties are visible. But many critics do not realize their function. They aim not to appreciate, but to judge; they seek first to draw lines about literature and then bully readers into accepting these laws. — David Cecil

I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule ...
Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path. — Nick Hornby

Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off. — Anis Shivani

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. — Susan Sontag

[To the critic who wrote a negative review:] I am sitting in the smallest room of the house. Your review is before me. Soon it will be behind me. — Tallulah Bankhead

They are four words I want you to keep in mind when critic's math gets loud. He wrote, We will miss you. — Jon Acuff

I wanna grow up and be a critic. — Richard Pryor

The care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature. — Samuel Johnson

Discernment is the son of good judgment and the father of self-control. When mixed with an already clear conscience, the ability to read the true motives of a critic keeps one's conscience both clear and at ease. — Criss Jami

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The key thing is you can be the only person, your own critic. — Ridley Scott

I'm my best and harshest critic. I know what's good and what isn't. — Anne Frank

It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing. — Peter Schjeldahl

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius. — George Steiner

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

No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need. — Simon Winchester

I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it ... and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy. — John Lennon

A good judge is not one who is impartial, but one who has prejudice for good. — Raheel Farooq

I'm my own worst critic. I could tell the critics a thing or two about my shows. — Jennifer Saunders

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable cloth by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors ? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and wich is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods. — Joseph Conrad

The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men. — Oscar Wilde

If we all believed our first critic, nothing great would have ever been accomplished. — Shanna Goodman

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former. — Northrop Frye

The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts. — Steven Pressfield

It's not the critic that counts. — Theodore Roosevelt

How often
today might Christians think they stand for "true" Christianity when what they stand for is a secular tradition-what cultural critic Raymond Williams would call a "selective tradition" (chapter five)-that has little to do with the kingdom of God? — Crystal L. Downing

I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read. — Quentin Tarantino

His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think. — Christopher Hitchens

They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought. — Antoni Tapies

The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world. — Joseph Campbell

I'm not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now. — Gordon Ramsay

You know, I really don't think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work. — Garry Winogrand

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author. — Isaac D'Israeli

I now understand that I would never have been able to become a plausible critic of the absurdities of modern consciousness until I myself had experienced them. I did not become an orthodox believer or theologian until after I tried out most of the errors long rejected by Christianity. If my first forty years were spent hungering for meaning in life, the last forty have been spent in being fed. If the first forty were prodigal, the last forty have been a homecoming. — Thomas C. Oden

Winning the war of words inside your soul means learning to defy your inner critic. — Steven Furtick

The critic of the Adepts would form a truer opinion of their attitude if he did not look upon them as guardians of a treasure, grudgingly doling it out to applicants whose rights it was impossible to ignore or defy, but rather as trainers of racehorses, patiently trying beast after beast in the hope that one may ultimately be found that will win the Grand National. The Adept who accepts an unsuitable pupil is guilty of cruelty just as much as the rider who sends a horse at a fence it cannot take. — Dion Fortune

I'm not a critic. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a philosopher. Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it. — Patti Smith

What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us to futile activity,
And in the end, Judge us still more severely,
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us? — T. S. Eliot

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation. — Joseph Addison

When you're a restaurant critic, you're not home at night, so breakfast became really important for us. — Ruth Reichl

I'm a very vicious critic of myself. — Dave Matthews

I relate to the feeling that Da Vinci was often plagued by the idea that what he did wasn't good enough, that he was his harshest critic. He'd sometimes destroy what he was working on. — David S.Goyer

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

Americans have a taste for ... rocking-chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is innocent, and easily pleased. — G.K. Chesterton

Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art. — David Toop

A bitter critic is the sweetest corrector. — Michael Bassey Johnson

As an actor, you get humbled all the time. Everyone is a critic. — Joe Regalbuto

I think everyone is their harshest critic, but I strive for excellence as much as I can because I think it shows. — Zachary Levi

For the critic, the word 'best' is like a grenade without a pin: Toss it around too freely, and you're likely to get your hand blown off. — Terry Teachout

I know as a critic I'm required to have a well-armored heart. I must be a cynical wise guy to show my great sophistication. No pushover, me. — Roger Ebert

We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life. — Lionel Trilling

For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand's work unfavorably. — Kingsley Amis

The Bible is our fire-guard. Some read God's Word critically but the Word is their critic and by their own attitude towards the Word they condemn themselves. — Reinhard Bonnke

Cortissoz was art critic of the New York Herald Tribune. — Abraham Lincoln

It's crazy how every guitarist is their own worst critic in many ways. — James Young

Those who are critical don't like being criticized, and those who are insensitive have a deficiency in their senses. — Suzy Kassem

The creator gives no heed to the critic unless he becomes a barren inventor. — Khalil Gibran

The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three. — Margaret Fuller

A critic who uses new quotations is making important changes. — Mason Cooley

Turn down the volume of your negative inner voice and create a nurturing inner voice to take it's place. When you make a mistake, forgive yourself, learn from it, and move on instead of obsessing about it. Equally important, don't allow anyone else to dwell on your mistakes or shortcomings or to expect perfection from you. — Beverly Engel

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back. — Marianne Moore

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic. — Harold Bloom

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

Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'
Here is a critic who says as a platitude
That I am guilty because 'in gratitude
Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe's Dupin as "very inferior".'
Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?
As the creator I've praised to satiety
Poe's Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation's crude vanity?
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical. — Arthur Conan Doyle

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. — Jeffrey Rosen

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. ~ Anton Ego, Ratatouille — Walt Disney Company

No-one ever built a statue of a critic. — David Nicholls

When I am on E! for the 'Fashion Police,' I only care about being a critic. It loses me many friends. — Joan Rivers

Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic. — Colm Toibin

I first came across her [Bae Suah] when I read some elderly male critic castigating her for 'doing violence to the Korean language', which of course was catnip to me, especially as I'd recently discovered Lispector doing pretty much the same to Portuguese. — Deborah Smith

I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic. I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents. — Anne Roiphe

I'm probably my biggest critic. There's nothing anyone can ask of me that I haven't already asked of myself. — Jhene Aiko

A critic must accept what is best in a poet, and thus become his best encourager. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

A critic may reject some miracle stories as legendary, and not others, with no inconsistency at all for the simple reason that even if one holds miracles to be possible, one need not hold legends to be impossible! There are other factors, literary and historiographical ones, that might lead a critic to conclude that even though miracles can happen, it does not appear that in this or that case they did. — Robert M. Price

The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying 'see what a nice person I am. — Brigid Brophy

The stage has a certain discipline. But the ultimate standard is more exacting in film, because you have to see yourself and you are your own toughest critic. — Jack Nicholson

Dad. I knew that was it. No more holding my hand. No more sitting in my lap. No more throwing your arms around my waist when I walked through the front door or standing on my shoes while we danced around the kitchen. I would be the bank now. The ride to your friend's house. The critic of your biology homework. The signature on the check mailed away with your college application. — Karin Slaughter

In the high school classroom you are a drill sergent, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw. — Frank McCourt

If you are not drawing fire from both Pharisees and Sadducees, you are probably saying something other than what Jesus said. And if your message is not drawing both tax collectors (Roman collaborators) and zealots (anti-Roman insurrectionists) to repentance, you are probably speaking with a different voice than does he. Jesus wasn't inconsistent. He saw the Roman Empire, despite all its pretensions to preeminence both in its own mind and in the mind of its opponents, as a temporary obstacle, not the defining point of his agenda. We stand and we speak, with reconciliation in view. We see, therefore, even our most passionate critic not as an argument to be vaporized but as a neighbor to be evangelized. This doesn't mean that we back down one iota from the truth. But we proclaim the whole gospel of truth and grace, never backing down from either. That means taking seriously the arguments of our opponents, not merely caricatures of those arguments. — Russell D. Moore

The best incentive for an artist are the harshest criticism — Miguel El Portugues

Criticism is not religion, and by no process can it be substituted for it. It is not the critic's eye, but the child's heart, that most truly discerns the countenance that looks out from the pages of the gospel. — John Campbell Shairp

Art critics are like every other critic. — Marc Jacobs

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.) — Jordan Sonnenblick

The phonograph and kinetoscope may some day seize and perpetuate all save the magnetic touch, but that weird, illusive, indefinable yet wonderfully real power by which the orator subdues may never be caught by science or preserved for the cruel dissecting knife of the critic. — David Josiah Brewer

Those who lack the guts to create critic. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I'm my own worst critic, so I try and not focus on what I've done wrong, or what I could improve on. — Mandy Moore

Easy to be a critic; hard to be a quarterback. — T. Scott McLeod

For every achievement, there is a critic to devalue its worth. — Wes Fesler