Critics Quotes

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.

Alfred North Whitehead

To many people dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.

John Mason Brown

The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.

Reprove not a scorner lest he hate thee rebuke a wise man and he will love thee.

Bible

In judging others folks will work overtime for no pay.

Charles Edwin Carruthers

A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.

If you are willing to take the punishment you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial the battle ugly is another point.

Lillian Hellman

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

Channing Pollock

Vilify! Vilify! Some of it will always stick.

Pierre Beaumarchais

Always bring money along with your complaints.

Plautus

Nature fits all her children with something to do He who would write and can't write can surely review.

James Russell Lowell

Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

To escape criticism - do nothing say nothing be nothing.

Any fool can criticize and many of them do.

Archbishop C. Garbett

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done they've seen it done every day but they're unable to do it themselves.

I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.

Max Reger

The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world tho' the cant of hypocrites may be the worst the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.

Laurence Sterne

The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights actors and audiences - a figure dreaded and occasionally comic but never welcome never loved.

Robertson Davies

A guest sees more in an hour than the host in a year.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.

Constant indiscriminate approval devalues because it is so predictable.

Kit Reed

Critics are biased and so are readers. (Indeed a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

Whitney Balliett

Don't judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.

American Indian saying

Henry James chews more than he bites off.

Mrs. Henry Adams

I don't want to see the uncut version of anything.

Jean Kerr

It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

George Bernard Shaw

The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.

Geoffrey Hartman

Two and two continue to make four in spite of the whine of the amateur for three or the cry of the critic for five.

James McNeill Whistler

Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.

He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help.

Abraham Lincoln

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader and would no more read a book alone if they could help it than have a baby alone.

Randall Jarrell

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.

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

His words leap across rivers and mountains but his thoughts are still only six inches long.

E B White

Critasism is just a way of saying i'm jelous of your talents

Rayvon L. Browne

The meaning you apply to what has happened to you is your decision. There will be critics that have their version, but God didn’t call them to be your audience, someone else did.

Shannon L. Alder

It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

Far from being a pack of baying butchers,critics sometimes have a perverse habit of tending to the sick and wounded on the cinematic field of battle, rushing in where angels fear to tread, even when the patient is clearly without a pulse.

Many critics are born of envy.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detach

Raymond Chandler

The chronic kicker, even the most violent critic, will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener— a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of his system.

The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities.

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

But you don't hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?" she protested."No, no, not for a moment. I merely maintain my right as an individual. I have just been telling you what I think, in order to explain why the elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me. The world's judges of music may all be right. But I am I, and I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind. If I don't like a thing, I don't like it, that's all; and there is no reason under the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of my fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it. I can't follow the fashions in the things I like or dislike.

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.

Loyalty in a critic is corruption.

George Bernard Shaw

Anaemia is an illness primarily affecting characters in novels.

Marchel Reich-Ranicki

Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world--they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this one.

Christian Nestell Bovee

I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and students who do know the field, meanwhile, have every right to challenge your ignorant prejudice. Rise, undergraduates of the English departments! You have nothing to lose but your A on the midterm!

Ursula K Le Guin

And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemny thoughtful.

Procrastination threatens critics’ livelihood.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.

Randall Jarrell

Critiquing a doer isn’t doing.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Magicians made magic but critics made it tricks.

When you say, ‘Women are untrustworthy bitches. They lie and cheat and will nail anything that moves.’ Do you know what I hear from your lips? Listen now, for I shall tell you. I hear you speak these words: 'I am an untrustworthy bastard. I lie and cheat and nail anything that moves.' André Chevalier

Nikki Sex

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