Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
Interpretation
The quote compares writers to lamp-posts, suggesting that writers, like lamp-posts, do not concern themselves with the opinions of critics.
Christopher Hampton's quote illustrates the notion that a writer's work should be independent of external criticism, just as a lamp-post is unaffected by the presence of dogs. This analogy highlights the idea that artists often focus on their craft without letting outside opinions influence their creative process, suggesting that critics' views are irrelevant to the true essence of writing.
In practice
In a discussion about the pressures of literary criticism, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of staying true to one's artistic vision.
Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.
I was born with music inside me. That's the only explanation I know of
When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.
Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?
I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way.
Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
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