Quotes on Critics

The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

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.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

I always tell people that they are really the critics. If people come three times a week to your restaurant they are the ones who find something they really love.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.

The artist must forget the audience, _x000D_ forget the critics, forget the technique, forget everything but love for the music._x000D_ Then, the music speaks through the performance,_x000D_ and the performer and the listener will walk together_x000D_ with the soul of the composer, and with_x000D_ God.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

I lost faith in the Oscars the first year I was a movie critic - the year that Bonnie and Clyde didn't win.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

I have very carefully studied Islam and the life of its Prophet (PBUH). I have done so both as a student of history and as a critic. And I have come to conclusion that Muhammad (PBUH) was indeed a great man and a deliverer and benefactor of mankind which was till then writhing under the most agonising Pain.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

Now in reality, the world has paid too great a compliment to critics, and has imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.

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.

If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.