Top 100 About Critics Quotes
#1. People think I'm against critics because they are negative to my work. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is they didn't see the work. I have seen critics print stuff about stuff I cut out of the film before we ran it. So don't tell me about critics.
Jerry Lewis
#2. There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.
Randall Jarrell
#3. The kindest thing one can say about critics is that they're extraneous.
Marty Rubin
#4. Asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking what a fire hydrant feels about dogs.
Ann Landers
#5. Asking a working writer what he feels about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
John Osborne
#6. Ask a writer what he thinks about critics and the answer you get is similar to what you get when you ask a lamppost how he feels about dogs.
Bert Sugar
#7. To complain about critics in a business is like a sailor complaining about the waves. Go back to the beach if you don't like it.
Ricky Gervais
#8. I learned a lot about critics, not to really take them too seriously about movies.
Gina Gershon
#9. Have you ever noticed how most critics disagree with the public? That should tell you a lot about critics.
Shia Labeouf
#12. Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
[Time Magazine, October 31, 1977]
John Osborne
#13. You never want to sound bitter about critics, because they're entitled to do their job, too, but I place much more trust in a person who I can look in the eye and someone who I know I share some kind of taste with - so my friends, for instance. For me, a critic is unknown and therefore irrelevant.
Laura Donnelly
#14. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
Ken Bruen
#15. I have always been very fond of them (drama critics) ... I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it.
Noel Coward
#16. I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It's like the way you'd follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.
Daniel Clowes
#17. To hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you'd think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story.
Noah Feldman
#18. The most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticized.
Ulysses S. Grant
#19. Hell, I suppose if you stick around long enough they have to say something nice about you.
Ava Gardner
#20. Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing "mere" about symbols.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#21. Seth: I write of love in my novels, write of it well, if my critics and fans are to be believed, but in all of my years at that typewriter, I never found the combination of words that would convey how I felt about you. You were my everything.
Lissa Bryan
#22. Those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.
Walter Cronkite
#23. It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.
William Monahan
#24. When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.
Amish Tripathi
#25. I don't care about people kissing my ass or telling me how great I am. I don't really give a damn. I read the bad stuff a whole lot more than I read the good stuff. I read that because there are always going to be critics who are going to say how good you aren't.
Richard Sherman
#26. My thought for today: Writing a letter to a friend today has helped clear a lot in my mind. It has taught me not to go on the defensive, instead to poke two fingers up to my critics who have no idea what restrictions there are when it comes to writing about a cold case".
Monica Weller
#27. I will say that the idea of a woman being deceptive came from that original discussion with critics and reporters about if woman could do that kind of thing. Evelyn, herself, grew out of the discussions about how capable women are of deceit and lying and manipulation.
Neil LaBute
#28. I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.
Anais Nin
#29. Meryl [Stripe]spoke out about the low percentage of female critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Why are there 760 male critics and just 168 women? You are immediately [biased] on what kind of films you are being told to go see. What are you told are good films? Male films.
Catherine Hardwicke
#30. 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.
Peter Doig
#31. Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word 'delicious' and its synonyms.
Bee Wilson
#32. Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy.
Edmund White
#33. Critics often say, 'Oh she makes films about strong women'. Wrong; I make films about complex characters and the choices they make.
Gillian Armstrong
#34. But thankfully, my first album, 'Wide Screen,' was sort of a critics' darling - everyone raved about it, but no one bought it. They only manufactured 10,000 copies; I wasn't even in the running for failure!
Rupert Holmes
#35. But I honestly don't read critics. My dad reads absolutely everything ever written about me. He calls me up to read ecstatic reviews, but I always insist that I can't hear them. If you give value to the good reviews, you have to give value to the criticism.
Fiona Apple
#36. What surprised me most about fame is how unpleasant it can be. I used to think it was going to be so fun. I got excited about the parties. You don't anticipate friends being jealous of you and critics giving your music bad reviews. Media and rumors - that stuff hurts.
Eve
#37. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
Richard Dawkins
#38. This is one of the things I find so insufferable about the liberal backlash against critics of Islam - especially the pernicious meme "Islamophobia," by which anyone who thinks Islam merits special concern at this moment in history is branded a bigot.
Sam Harris
#39. The only thing that surprised me about 'Lincoln' is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that 'Lincoln' is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay.
Terry Teachout
#40. More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.
Jerry Saltz
#41. To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don't be economic girlie men!
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#42. It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.
Raymond Chandler
#43. Lately even the harshest critics of President Bush have been forced to admit maybe he's right about freedom's march around the globe. What if we are watching an example of presidential leadership that will be taught in American schools for generations to come? It's an idea gaining more currency.
Brian Williams
#44. 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
#45. An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.
H.G.Wells
#46. I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.
Clifford Geertz
#47. My people keep telling me I shouldn't write letters like this to critics. The way I see it, critics get to say what they want to about my work, so why shouldn't I be able to say what I want to about theirs?
Donald J. Trump
#48. Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label
to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.
John Irving
#49. Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.
Karl Kraus
#50. I don't pay no attention to what critics say about me, the good or the bad. The toughest critic I got is myself ... and I'm too vain to play anything I think is bad.
Miles Davis
#51. One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: 'They present solutions, but I don't like them.
Noam Chomsky
#52. Since I started CrossFit, I've read and heard about the critics talk about how unsafe it is, and my only response to that is any form of exercise can be unsafe if you don't have the proper coaching, education and guidance.
Bob Harper
#53. Last year I gave several lectures on "Intelligence and Musicality among Animals" ... Today I am going to speak to you about "Intelligence and Musicality among Critics" ... The subject is much the same, with some modifications, of course.
Erik Satie
#54. The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.
Gregory Benford
#55. Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion.
Robert Genn
#56. I don't trust white critics' judgment about most things that deal with black life, particularly when a black person is the creator.
Terry McMillan
#57. The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and the viewer.
Oscar Handlin
#58. I'm just about the best singer I know, and it's time for everybody to say that. I have total facility with my voice. And for some weird reason, critics don't talk about it.
Daryl Hall
#59. I have a folder where I keep all the articles the critics have written about me. It makes me feel good.
Norman Wisdom
#60. You become a film critic because you're interested in film. I don't know whether knowing so much about cinema leads you to make better films, but it certainly can't hurt.
Michael Haneke
#61. TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.
Charles Kuralt
#62. Critics don't bother me because if I do badly, I know I'm bad before they even write it. And if I'm good, I know I'm good. I know best about myself, so a critic doesn't anger me.
Frank Sinatra
#63. The fact is, for all the critics' talk about me as a realist, I'm making everything up - everything. It is all about imagining with me.
Richard Bausch
#64. Children read books, not reviews," he wrote. "They don't give a hoot about the critics." And: "When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority." Best of all - and to the relief of authors everywhere - children "don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity.
Steven D. Levitt
#65. I haven't seen the show, but when it was finished I felt good about what we had done. I don't know how it will stack up with Survival, but that'll be up to the critics.
Vic Morrow
#66. Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.
Wim Wenders
#67. I've been pretty well treated by the critics, but the critics who didn't like my comedies hated them with an unbridled passion, and then I would see these same people writing very respectfully about ordinary naturalistic plays.
David Lindsay-Abaire
#68. It's not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.
Paulo Coelho
#69. The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.
Craig Brown
#70. More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.
Craig Brown
#71. I'm my own worst critic. I could tell the critics a thing or two about my shows.
Jennifer Saunders
#72. I've got the public. I don't care about the critics. I did at one time. I don't any more. I did when I needed compliments. But if you get a lot of compliments, you don't need a critic to tell you, 'This should be done another way.'
LeRoy Neiman
#73. It's about finding your people, your listeners, your readers, and making art for and with them. Not for the masses, not for the critics, but for your ever-widening circle of friends. It
Amanda Palmer
#74. Many of the critics today get airline tickets, hotel accommodation, bags, beautiful photographs, gifts and other expenses paid by the distributors, and then are supposed to write serious articles about the movie.
Wim Wenders
#75. He'd stolen his philosophy of editing from the old New Critics - it's just about the book. Not the author, not the market, not the reader ... one judged a book only by the book.
Tiffany Reisz
#76. It used to worry me what people said about me. I'm learning not to worry as much. Sometimes you feel critics are wrong all the time, but I don 't take objection to it, because that's the way it goes. They can be wrong, they can be right. They can be cruel, they can be kind.
Al Pacino
#77. The critics have been writing me off for 20 years. That's nothing new. As far as I know I still have plenty of fans and sell lots of records. Do I care what critics say about me? No, and I don't read reviews.
Madonna Ciccone
#78. Different critics go to different lengths to disagree with that sentiment, but ultimately, they're the person experiencing this art, and whatever judgment or taste they use is internal, and says more about them than about the record they're writing about.
Chuck Klosterman
#79. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad - in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock.
G.K. Chesterton
#80. 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.
Harvey Fierstein
#81. 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.
Randy Pausch
#82. We can already say emphatically that there is no longer any solid basis for dating any book of the New Testament after about A.D. 80, two full generations before the date between 130 and 150 given by the more radical New Testament critics of today.
William F. Albright
#83. In one way or another, President Obama's critics will dog him all the way to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and even his admirers will continue to have doubts about his accomplishments if not his promise.
Tom Brokaw
#84. I'm not going to worry about the critics until some of my peers start saying I'm a softie.
Don Shula
#85. Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work.
Marilyn Monroe
#86. I don't really think about the critics or the commercial success.
Jurnee Smollett
#87. I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
Salman Rushdie
#88. That's the holy grail as a TV writer, to work on a story that you care about and to put it out there and for it to find the audience and connect with fans and connect with critics.
Glen Mazzara
#89. The critics and hardcore music fans, those are the people you have to get to first, so we're really happy about it.
Craig Finn
#90. When it comes to overcoming writing hurdles, getting sick is like suffering a review from a critic with an axe to grind; you can't let it get you down!
Max Hawthorne
#91. Along with my peers, I gripe about the increasing number of superhero films, and I'm sad that so many critics so uncritically use words like franchise, which should be reserved for your local Burger King.
David Edelstein
#92. All my friends are rock critics, so we talk about rock criticism a lot. Because of that, in order to be part of the conversation, you have to have an awareness of what the discussion is.
Chuck Klosterman
#93. 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.
Jean Cocteau
#94. When a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime.
Charles Saatchi
#95. If you think about it, critics are an unnecessary life-form on the planet Earth, and here's why: because it's a job without credentials. You don't have to go to school.
Gene Simmons
#96. Genius feels like an over extended Helium balloon about to burst, and everyone criticizes you for not having a conventional way of coping with it.
Solange Nicole
#97. Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don't have to worry about anything.
Brian McKnight
#98. Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?
Paulo Coelho
#99. You can think what you like of Madonna - about her political choices and her PR - but you have to respect her courage not to let the critics stop her exploring her potential.
Natalie Dormer
#100. The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.
R.M. Engelhardt
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