Quotes on Critics

People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser...and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.

The critics are always right. The only way you shut them up is by winning.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

People call you this or that. But I can't respond because then it seems like I'm defensive, you know, what does it matter, really?

Dear, damned, distracting town, farewell! Thy fools no more I'll tease: This year in peace, ye critics, dwell, Ye harlots, sleep at ease!

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

I've lost many of my best friends... I'm going to satisfy myself now, not the critics, not even my friends.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Be a role model not a critic. Don't tell your children, your peers, or your subordinates what to do - show them. And when the lesson is over, keep showing them by demonstrating that your actions are part of your character, not part of their curriculum.

Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic

Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease.

Criticism does not disturb me, for I am my own severest critic. Always in my playing I strive to surpass myself, and it is this constant struggle that makes music fascinating to me.

There is something particularly unique about the films of Hong Sang-soo...it's got to do with his masterful sense of storytelling... as the critic Manny Farber once said of Hitchcock's ROPE Hong Sang-soo's pictures unpeel like an orange.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

What I do requires fantastic concentration... but you can't be totally alone, or you lose all contact with reality, so even when I'm engrossed and secluded, Jack Dunphy can be there. He's my oldest and best friend, and best critic too.

I find it very interesting: when 90 percent of the critics that review films are men, how is that helpful when trying to create stories from a feminine point of view?

To straddle the middle ground and win elections, we have to be in charge of the political agenda. This can only be done by not being beaten in the argument with our critics. They complain that I come down too hard on their arguments. But wrong ideas have to be challenged before they influence public opinion and make for problems. Those who try to be clever at the expense of the government should not complain if my replies are as sharp as their criticisms.