Top 100 Critic Quotes
#1. However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.
Ted Allen
#2. For the poor the whole world is a self-constituted critic; your smallest action is open to debate. No secret place of your soul is safe from invasion.
Alice Foote MacDougall
#3. If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.
Oscar Wilde
#4. My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#5. The helium which we handle must have been put together at some time and some place. We do not argue with the critic who urges that the stars are not hot enough for this process; we tell him to go and find a hotter place.
Arthur Eddington
#6. I've often been criticised, but never critically wounded
Johnny Rich
#7. I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value
certainly no large value.
Mark Twain
#8. I'm my own biggest critic. I'm the one who has to go home and look at myself in the mirror.
Tony Gonzalez
#9. My work is very much like the restaurant critic's - a number of factors come together to make for a strong review.
Hank Stuever
#10. I always wanted praise, and I always wanted attention; I won't lie to you. I was a jazz critic, and that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted people to write about me, not me about them. So I thought, 'What could I do? I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't act or anything like that. OK, I can write.'
Harvey Pekar
#11. I never knew any painter worthy of the name who paid the smallest attention to what a critic says, even in conversation.
Robert Baldwin Ross
#12. He who frowns when they say that he sucks shouldn't smile when they say that he rocks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#13. Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
Raymond Chandler
#14. I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
Jim Harrison
#15. I'm probably my biggest critic. I worry that if you spend any quality time reveling in good things then karma will slap you upside the head, so I try to stay as even keel as I'm able.
Neil Patrick Harris
#16. I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.
Claire Tomalin
#17. I don't know anyone actually who does care what a critic says.
Lou Reed
#18. It is better to be making the news than taking it, to be an actor rather than a critic.
Winston Churchill
#19. The most useless job in the world is that of the critic. That is a prejudiced statement. I admit it. I'm prejudiced. I hate critics ... And now, as the saying goes (yesterday, I couldn't even spell critik), and now I are one.
David Gerrold
#20. This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.
Carl Jung
#21. You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.
Theophile Gautier
#23. The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.
Oscar Wilde
#25. In marriage, each partner is to be an encourager rather than a critic; a forgiver rather than a collector of hurts; an enabler rather than a reformer.
H. Norman Wright
#27. For every achievement, there is a critic to devalue its worth.
Wes Fesler
#28. Leaders learn more from blames than praises. Praises make them know what's already done well; blames show them what's yet to be done well.
Israelmore Ayivor
#29. Aristotle was the first accurate critic and truest judge nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever had; for he noted the vices of all knowledges, in all creatures, and out of many men's perfections in a science he formed still one Art.
Ben Jonson
#30. The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.
Max Beerbohm
#31. I don't think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what's the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.
Percival Everett
#32. Sometimes I'd like everybody who is stuck, or lost, or vacant to stay that way and keep silent for as long as it takes, but that's the critic in me talking.
David Toop
#33. PERFECTION, n. An imaginary state of quality distinguished from the actual by an element known as excellence; an attribute of the critic.
Ambrose Bierce
#34. The cliche was always that 'everybody's a critic,' but it becomes truer every day. Long before reviews appear in the traditional outlets, you can now usually discover - somewhere in the thickets of the Internet - reactions to shows from people who've seen them in previews.
Ben Brantley
#35. The critic's first labor is the task of distinguishing between men, as history and their works display them, and the ideals which one and another have conspired to urge upon his acceptance.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
#36. If the function of the artist is to see, the first duty of the critic is to understand what the artist saw.
J. E. H. MacDonald
#37. Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.
Steven Pressfield
#38. In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael
#39. No one has ever built a statue to a critic, it's true. On the other hand, it's only the people with statues that get pooped on by birds flying by.
Seth Godin
#40. To me, a critic is some loser who has no idea ... someone with an opinion. We all have opinions. No offense, but what makes them dictate what is cool and what is not.
Vanilla Ice
#41. As a writer of criticism, the consumer thing is the least interesting thing, but as a critic, the single worst thing you can do is send a reader to waste time and money on something - even if it's something you personally love. You have to indicate the reasons why you love it and they'll hate it.
Jonathan Gold
#42. I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.
James Whistler
#43. Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.
Claude Monet
#44. Your harshest critic is always going to be yourself. Don't ignore that critic but don't give it more attention than it deserves.
Michael Ian Black
#45. The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
Walter Benjamin
#47. If you're a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.
Gore Vidal
#48. I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.
John Steinbeck
#49. By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).
Brenda Ueland
#50. CRITIC OR CITRIC?
Anagram of ordinary passing judgement on talented
Kamil Ali
Kamil Ali
#51. A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself.
Terry Teachout
#52. These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
Henry Adams
#53. I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
#54. 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
#55. I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.
Djuna Barnes
#56. The whole idea of genre and categorising films is a critic's construct. For me, I just try and make stories and see where they go, but there's nothing wrong with horror; there's nothing wrong with romantic comedies.
Ben Wheatley
#57. When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
Leslie Fiedler
#59. People become discouraged when they listen to their 'inner critic' ... Whatever that voice is saying, articulate a response, drawing from the part of you that feels strong and confident. Be your own cheerleader.
Lauren Mackler
#60. 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
#61. The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic
to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it.
Edward Albee
#63. John Wilkes Booth, who said, Sorry, I thought he was a critic. Never got a dinner!
Red Buttons
#64. Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.' 'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.
David Foster Wallace
#66. A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.
Tyne Daly
#67. For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.
Peter Medawar
#68. As lovely as people are to me about my performance, I'm still a huge critic. I like very little of what I ever do.
Daniel Gillies
#69. Soon after I left university, I came up with another definition of a literary critic or would be critic: someoone who uses churlish towards the end of an article or review.
Gerald Murnane
#70. A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.
Wilson Mizner
#72. It has been rightly said that what a critic wants to understand he must, at one time, have deeply loved, even if only for a fleeting moment.
Martin Esslin
#73. Tipsy actress Vera Charles (who had 'more changes of costume than facial expression,' according to one critic to whom she never spoke again) ...
Patrick Dennis
#74. 'Chef' is a dish of arroz con pollo served with a smile but not much style. The critic in the film would give it a low grade, for agreeability without ambition.
Richard Corliss
#76. I'm the biggest critic of my own work, but sometimes you nail a chapter so good that you have to take a step back and admire that bitch.
R.D. Ronald
#78. (In response to a picture critic.)
I'm actually a very joyful person. But being a genius with a photographic memory mixed with a strong case of OCD makes for a difficult picture sometimes.
Calvin W. Allison
#79. There are good and bad critics like good or bad artists. A good critic says why they didn't like it. A bad critic gives it away that they don't like you as a person. I quite like that as well, because it means that I've won.
Ricky Gervais
#80. For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn't written for poets, it's written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it's true for oneself.
Helen Vendler
#81. An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who's the better writer?
Jason Lutes
#82. I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it's not possible to write criticism if you're making films.
Paul Schrader
#83. Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
Greil Marcus
#84. The care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature.
Samuel Johnson
#85. The critic is a prisoner to his own experiences and perspectives, erroneously believing his limited experiences are the sum of all truth
T.D. Jakes
#86. 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
#87. As an actor, you get humbled all the time. Everyone is a critic.
Joe Regalbuto
#88. Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.
Jean Sibelius
#92. I think to be a movie critic is troubling from one major respect. If you are forced to watch ten movies a week, it's really only something you can do for a few years. After a while, it's a bit too much.
James Gray
#93. First you throw bread at my head and bow you expect me to be a movie critic- Raphael said to Elena
Nalini Singh
#94. I'm my own worst critic. I mean, I know what's wrong with everything that I've done.
Robert Barry
#95. Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.
Tim Pat Coogan
#96. A work, however, should be judged by its design and its execution, and not by any preconceived notion of what it ought to be according to the critic, rather than the author.
Isaac D'Israeli
#97. While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)
Cyril Connolly
#98. If you're not your own severest critic, you are your own worst enemy.
Jay Maisel
#99. A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet.
Francois Mauriac
#100. Modern liberalism has many roots. One of the most important is the ideas of a man described by an American critic as 'his satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill' and revered by others.
Alan Ryan
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