Quotes on Critics

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.

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.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

The '80s made up for all the abuse I took during the '70s. I outlived all my critics. By the time I retired, everybody saw me as a venerable institution. Things do change.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods. This makes them prone to set themselves up as critics and censors of the frail and erring human beings whose lot they share.

Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics; they desire our blood not our pain.

A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.

When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.

He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

Never answer a critic, unless he's right.

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.

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden

Pay no attention to what the critics say; _x000D_ _x000D_ no statue has ever been erected to a critic.

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.