Top 100 To The Critics Quotes
#1. It would not be fair to the critics of Rotary, who include some of the most brilliant of the British and American writers, to charge them with prejudice.
Paul Harris
#2. I can't say what my greatest strength between acting and singing is ... I'll leave that to the critics. Maybe my best strength is performance itself, being with the audience and feeling what they feel, bouncing off of them.
Erica Schroeder
#3. I tried not to listen very much to the critics. I know that whenever you do something, you must have a lot of critics, or it means that you haven't done anything. I never really bothered much and I don't care.
Benedetta Tagliabue
#4. To the critics: You always complain that Hollywood never gives you new stuff, and then when you get it, you flip out. Lighten up.
Peter Farrelly
#5. The worst advice? 'Don't listen to the critics.' I think that you really ought to listen to the critics, because sometimes they're telling you something is broken that you can fix.
Stephen King
#6. All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.
Carla H. Krueger
#7. I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I'm on course, and I'm doing what God wants me to do. I'm real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.
Joel Osteen
#8. 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
#9. The last madness I'll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.
Gerard De Nerval
#10. Don't pay any attention to the critics - don't even ignore them.
Samuel Goldwyn
#11. I don't think the audience always listens to the critics. That's been proven time and time again.
Mel Gibson
#12. The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
William Faulkner
#13. I wanted to do 'Texas Trilogy' on stage. But it didn't do well in New York. In fact, it did very badly there, thanks to the critics. It was said that Preston Jones, the author, died of ulcer complications, but the truth was that the critics killed him.
Diane Ladd
#14. Listen to the praises about you in silence; listen to the critics about you even in more silence!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#15. If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter
Anton Chekhov
#16. There's always been a lot of negative stuff written about me. That's why I don't pay any attention to the critics. They've never liked anything I've done. What do critics know? It's the way the audience reacts that matters.
Eddie Murphy
#17. What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#18. Listen not to the critics who put their own dreams on the shelf.
Garth Brooks
#19. And then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter.
W. Somerset Maugham
#20. If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.
Graham Joyce
#21. If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.
Oscar Wilde
#22. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.
Edward Abbey
#23. If you have to explain your sense of humor, then you are performing for the wrong crowd.
Shannon L. Alder
#24. John McCain responded to critics who say he's too old for a sixth term by saying that his mother is 103 years old and doing well. The crazy thing is that even she is somehow younger than John McCain.
Jimmy Fallon
#25. Some people need to stay at the top. They are afraid to re-start from zero because they fear the critics.
Eric Cantona
#26. By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.
Michael Eric Dyson
#27. Nothing feels worse than knowing that people didn't see your movie. That they wanted to and the critics loved it but nobody knew where it was because it didn't do what it was supposed to do opening weekend. It used to be that independents were allowed to stay in the theaters, build word of mouth.
Allison Anders
#28. 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
#29. Learn to use the criticism as fuel and you will never run out of energy.
Orrin Woodward
#30. When you invent something, there will always be people to criticise. God's creation is full of critics, but has God given up His creation because of the critics?
Sri Chinmoy
#31. 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
#32. To go after what you want in life, you have to silence the critics, starting with the biggest one: you.
Regina Brett
#33. We don't stoop to the level of our worst critics, no matter how much we may find them to be annoying.
Jimmy Wales
#34. As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism's traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.
Tony Judt
#36. The critics love to get out their knives and dine on Coverdale. But the worse the criticism gets, the more successful I become.
David Coverdale
#37. This argument didn't seem to placate the critics, so the AAFP executive
Michael Greger
#38. The volume of twaddle from critics is directly proportional to the distance you keep from them. There is always room to spread your wings when you fly solo.
J.N. Race
#39. Proposing inner-life solutions to our political and economic catastrophes is something done, say the critics, only by people who've spent more time in la-la land than in the 'real world.'
Parker Palmer
#40. Art has a noble task: to educate man. That's why the writer's part in our society is a most responsible one. The writers are the architects of human souls and the critics are the architects of the writer's souls.
Slawomir Mrozek
#41. The inability of some critics to connect the dots doesn't make pointillism pointless
Georges Seurat
#42. Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most part it's the other way around: companies must make what consumers want and deliver it at the lowest possible price.
James Surowiecki
#43. 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
#44. Critics of the system say they want to get enough people involved to dilute the handful of wealthy donors and big-money groups who are essentially drowning out everybody else.
Anonymous
#45. All great people had critics but they stay believe in the beauty of their dreams, fully persuaded to stay focused and determined for the realisation of their dreams.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#46. There's a bait and switch going on here because the critics want the textbooks to question whether evolution occurred. And of course they don't because scientists don't question whether evolution occurred.
Eugenie Scott
#47. If we are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our Pupils are fit to become our Critics & Rivals
C.S. Lewis
#48. By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).
Brenda Ueland
#49. When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square ... the critics ... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert" ... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling ...
Kazimir Malevich
#50. Momofuku is not me. It's everyone. I'm just the facade. We have to exceed expectations and be our harshest critics.
David Chang
#51. I'm too rich to care what the critics say.
Mel Gibson
#52. You have to channel the interpretation and performance into 100 people. And with the audience, the critics.
Riccardo Muti
#53. I've had so much positive reaction and emotional fulfillment from the creation of my art and sharing it with everyday people that I never paid too much attention to the opinion of critics.
Thomas Kinkade
#54. After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
Edith Wharton
#55. Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.
Thomas Pynchon
#56. China's critics rightly condemn the government for controlling public opinion in all sorts of ways, from imprisoning dissidents to censoring internet discussions. Yet the regime's obsession with control paradoxically means it pays close attention to public opinion.
Anonymous
#57. 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
#58. To these things do writers sink; and then the critics tell them that they "talk for effect"; and then the writers answer: "What the devil else should we talk for? Ineffectualness?
G.K. Chesterton
#59. 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
#60. I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.
Charles McCarry
#61. It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.
Will Self
#62. I love to go to the movies with people, but a lot of the time it's me in a room with a bunch of other movie critics, which is fine.
Wesley Morris
#63. It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.
William Monahan
#64. Don't be taken in by the guff that critics are killing the theater. Commonly they sin on the side of enthusiasm. Too often they give their blessing to trash.
Tallulah Bankhead
#65. Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.
Stephen Leacock
#66. One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.
Robert Hughes
#67. 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
#68. I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.
Arnold Friberg
#69. It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.
Frank Kermode
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.
Jean Sibelius
#74. You should never appease terrorists. The mistake made by critics of the 'talking to your enemy' approach is to equate talking with appeasing.
Jonathan Powell
#75. The B'nai B'rith is established by Jews in New York City as a Masonic Lodge. 70 years later this group will establish the notorious Anti-Defamation League, designed to promote any critics of Jewish supremacism or criminality, as, anti-Semitic.
Anonymous
#76. Remind your critics when they say you don't have the expertise or experience to do something that an amateur built the ark and the experts built the Titanic
Peyton Manning
#77. Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book is TRUE TO LIFE unless it is true to the WORST IN LIFE, that the idea has infected even the women.
Gene Stratton-Porter
#78. 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
#79. For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.
Allen Tate
#80. The amazing thing now is that most of those so-called critics who were telling me to find my own voice seem to have lost theirs.
Brian Lumley
#81. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.
Ishmael Reed
#82. Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers.
Pauline Kael
#83. Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#84. I criticize those critics. The reason being that they're doing one of the worst things that ever can be done to an actor, which is to say, Look, you do what we like you to do or else.
James Lipton
#85. One problem with the work of the New Critics was that their close readings, no matter how brilliant, could not deliver all they seemed to promise.
Jewel Spears Brooker
#86. Critics of home-schooling hate the idea of home-schooling and the freedom from the government school monopoly that it represents. Their attacks on academic success are just a transparent attempt to divert attention from their own failings.
Glenn Beck
#87. I've been lucky. The critics never went out of their way to single me out for doing bad work.
James Caan
#88. Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word 'delicious' and its synonyms.
Bee Wilson
#89. The world still awaits a proper inquiry into climategate: one that is not stacked with global warming advocates and one that is prepared to cross-examine evidence, interview critics as well as supporters of the CRU and other IPCC players, and follow the evidence where it clearly leads.
Ross McKitrick
#90. Many of the critics have kids of their own. It scares the hell out of them to think that their kids could be anything remotely like David Lee Roth.
David Lee Roth
#91. 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
#92. I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.
Howard Hodgkin
#93. What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
Doris Lessing
#94. We need to have great wealth and we need to have the critics of great wealth.
T. J. Stiles
#95. 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
#96. Always play to the cheap seats. That's where the critics sit. The people who sit up front don't come to hear you play; they come to sit up front.
Dave Evans
#97. In the '50s, critics used to say I had a 'dangerous' act.
Eartha Kitt
#98. 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
#99. Critics all have this idea that authors inhabit another dimensional realm, right up to their first smack in the mouth - which feels to them quite miraculous, being their sex-dream come true.
Don Paterson
#100. In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.
Joanne Harris
