Top 100 Critic Quotes
#1. I think that when a film does its job, it poses questions rather than gives answers. It should act as a frustrating counselor who, at your bidding for advice, says, 'What do you think?' I think that's some of what the culture critic Greg Tate meant by art leaving a 'metaphysical stain.'
Aunjanue Ellis
#2. My husband, who's the greatest actor in the world, can do anything. Look at what he did in The Critic and Oedipus. In every role he gets-he did this in Richard the Third-there's nothing he can't do, nothing. Just nothing.
Vivien Leigh
#3. If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic.
Roman Payne
#4. It is as hard to find a neutral critic as it is a neutral country in time of war. I suppose if a critic were neutral, he wouldn't trouble to write anything.
Katherine Anne Porter
#5. I am strongly convinced that the people or society is the best and the most unerring critic.
Vissarion Belinsky
#6. Each man judges correctly those matters with which he is acquainted; it is of these that he is a competent critic.
Aristotle.
#7. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.
John Keats
#8. There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.
Neil Gaiman
#9. I am my own worst critic and I am hell to pay so I just have to do everything to my utmost ability.
Michael Jai White
#10. A critic is a virgin who would teach Don Juan how to make love.
Tristan Bernard
#11. [Louis] Brandeis, like [Tomas] Jefferson, is an equal opportunity critic of bigness. And he, like Jefferson, sees American history as this incredible clash between small producers, farmers, and small business people on the one hand, and wicked oligarchs and financiers and monopolists on the other.
Jeffrey Rosen
#12. A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.
Jonathan Swift
#13. Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.
Harold Bloom
#14. Methinks I am never quite committed, never wholly the creature of my moods, but always to some extent their critic. My only integral experience is in my vision. I see, perchance, with more integrity than I feel.
Henry David Thoreau
#15. That big fat oaf Gil Chesterton once said that the criminal is the artist, the detective only the critic ... he was wrong. I was an artist, for it is an artist's purpose to make order out of chaos. A criminal defaces; a detective restores.
Lavie Tidhar
#16. I'd actually really love to review books and films and plays, but you can't be an artist and a critic. I would love it if I could.
Romola Garai
#17. 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
#18. I can certainly be my own worst critic and oftentimes forget to enjoy the here and now.
Tricia Helfer
#19. I became a film director, but I wasn't successful with my first couple of films, so I had to turn to becoming a film critic to make a living.
Park Chan-wook
#20. 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
#21. My mother and my grandmother are pioneers of Mexican cuisine in this country, so I grew up in the kitchen. My mom, Zarela Martinez, was by far my biggest influence and inspiration - and toughest critic.
Aaron Sanchez
#22. A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
Mignon McLaughlin
#23. George Jean Nathan, the critic and editor. Nathan, according to the Earthling concept of time, had died back in 1958. According to the Tralfamadorian concept, of course, Nathan was still alive somewhere and always would be.
Kurt Vonnegut
#24. Anytime that another artist or a critic that is well-respected says something nice about you, you're always thankful and hope that you can live up to that.
Chris Stapleton
#25. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that 'words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.' That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.
p.20
Nina Sankovitch
#26. The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To describe blow-jobs artistically.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.
Louis Dudek
#29. If a critic doesn't think I can act, it's because I'm not acting. That's me - and that's the way I act.
Donna Brazile
#30. 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
#31. 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.
Theodore Bikel
#32. The key thing is you can be the only person, your own critic.
Ridley Scott
#33. He'd learned quickly enough that when you cooked for a family, everybody was a critic.
Nora Roberts
#34. It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.
Alexander Chee
#35. A social critic is someone whose work revolves around where and how our successes are failing us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#36. Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.
Joanna Scott
#37. The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
H.L. Mencken
#38. The job of the critic is to report to us his moods.
Oscar Wilde
#39. Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art.
David Toop
#40. Don't be your own worst critic. If you're not confident in what you're saying, no one else will be either.
Travis Bradberry
#41. Just then, with a wink and a sly normal lurch, The owl very gravely got down from his perch, Walked round, and regarded his fault-finding critic (Who thought he was stuffed) with a glance analytic.
James Thomas Fields
#42. The relationship between critic and writer is similar to the one between the pigeon and the statue.
Ashwin Sanghi
#43. Behind every humorist who delights in knifing hypocrites is a major self-critic.
Wendy Aron
#44. I'm my own worst critic, and if I don't pull off what I think I wanted to do in my head, then I won't be a happy girl.
Amy Winehouse
#45. 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
#46. The relationship between the critic and writer is similar to the one between the pigeon and the statue or the dog and lamp post.
Ashwin Sanghi
#47. It's a lot more fun being a critic than being the one criticized.
Ed Koch
#48. The critic said, but don't you feel awkward about biting the hand that feeds you? I said no, I enjoy just gnawing it up to the shoulder.
Myles Horton
#49. Men whose sense of taste is destroyed by sickness, sometimes think honey sour. A diseased eye does not see many things which do exist, and notes many things which do not exist. The same thing frequently takes place with regard to the force of words, when the critic is inferior to the writer.
Saint Basil
#50. I think I have a lot of voices in my head and I guess my inner critic is a female.
Jim Gaffigan
#52. Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.
Oscar Wilde
#53. Unfortunately, many regard the critic as an enemy, instead of seeing him as a guide to the truth.
Wilhelm Steinitz
#54. I cannot watch my own dailies, ever. I'm my worst critic. It distracts me. I can watch it when it's done, but I'm not the girl that wants to run back and look at the performance.
Eliza Dushku
#55. Does the critic wish to influence the kind of film that costs more than £250,000? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors explaining that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car.
Kenneth Tynan
#56. The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy - yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.
Nelson Algren
#57. (...) life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens... Stories solve this problem - as the critic Clive James once put it, 'Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.' This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.
Paul Bloom
#58. When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.
Sharon Salzberg
#59. The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience--that is to say, they must be subjective.
Clive Bell
#60. For me, it's easier to like more things than to dislike them; I'm not a critic in that sense. I find it easier to like more, to be more open and enjoy more things, which has given me more opportunities.
David LaChapelle
#61. In moments of prayer, people tend to pose as a critic and point out percieved flaws in God's art.
Steve Maraboli
#63. The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.
(A Qualified Farewell)
Raymond Chandler
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. As we passed his table, I saw that the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work - and it's author - in bondage.
Dean Koontz
#67. If an artist has talent, he needs no other critic.
Robert Breault
#68. I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
William Golding
#70. Also, many consumers consider a critic to be like God Almighty.
Robert Mondavi
#71. Be a role model not a critic. Don't tell your children, your peers, or your subordinates what to do - show them. And when the lesson is over, keep showing them by demonstrating that your actions are part of your character, not part of their curriculum.
Denis Waitley
#72. When it comes to your inner critic, my advice is to not take advice from someone who doesn't like you. That's like returning to the perpetrator for healing after you've been abused.
Patrick Califia
#73. It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.
Theodore Roosevelt
#74. I went into architecture a little as 'Peck's Bad Boy.' It allowed me to be a critic in a socially condoned way.
James Polshek
#75. I wish I could be like Shaw who once read a bad review of one of his plays, called the critic and said: 'I have your review in front of me and soon it will be behind me.'
Barbra Streisand
#76. Even though I resigned as Papandreou's adviser early in 2006 and turned into his government's staunchest critic during his mishandling of the post-2009 Greek implosion, my public interventions in the debate on Greece and Europe have carried no whiff of Marxism.
Yanis Varoufakis
#77. Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.
P.G. Wodehouse
#78. The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.
Clive James
#79. It is essential for the good of criticism that both the critic and the public face the fact that a review is not the voice of God.
Judith Crist
#80. You're your worst critic, and I don't like the way I sound on the mic.
Ginuwine
#81. I have long been a critic of Social Security, basically because I believe that it is not the business of government to tell people what fraction of their incomes they should devote to providing for their own or someone else's old age.
Milton Friedman
#82. It is a poor critic who says that a lack of effect on them implies all others are insincere in their love.
Kieron Gillen
#83. I don't think the role of the critic has changed very much. In the most positive sense, the music critic is one who helps the public navigate what's out there, especially in bringing attention to things they otherwise wouldn't hear about, or to provide a new window into something familiar.
Michael Hersch
#84. A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.
Walter Bagehot
#85. Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.
Chuck Jones
#86. 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
#87. My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author.
Joyce Carol Oates
#88. I feel that the critic and music director should have such a good relationship they can pick up the phone and call each other any time.
Zubin Mehta
#90. The criticism does not hurt because I have always been my own worst critic. I wouldn't say I don't respect other people's opinions, but my opinion is the most important.
Tony McCoy
#91. Food critic and writer Waverley Root described the common American near beer as "such a wishy-washy, thin, ill-tasting, discouraging sort of slop that it might have been dreamed up by a Puritan Machiavelli with the intent of disgusting drinkers with genuine beer forever."[21]
Waverly Root
#92. If you are going to do anything, you must expect criticism. But it's better to be a doer than a critic. The doer moves; the critic stands still, and is passed by.
Bruce Barton
#93. 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
#94. A critic is a person who rationalizes his likes and dislikes in such impressive language that the layman thinks he is reasoning instead of rationalizing.
Helen McCloy
#95. I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.
Jerry Saltz
#96. 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
#97. The commonplace needs no defence,Dullness is in the critic's eyes,Without a licence life evolvesFrom some dim phase its own surprise;Under these yellow-twinkling elms,Behind these hedges trimly shorn,As in a stable once, so hereIt may be born, it may be born.
William Plomer
#98. I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.
Jerry Saltz
#100. According to one critic, my works looked like scraped billboards. I went to look at the billboards and decided that more billboards should be scraped.
Mark Tobey
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