Critic Quotes

I know that I am my worst critic. I know that if I can walk away from the set at the end of the day and feel that I did the best job I could and feel proud, that's what will satisfy me.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

Now everyone is a critic.

I am an Episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously, and I would, I think, be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up. I am also a critic of Christianity, if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.

No manager in the world gets good results all the time and you know there's people always ready to have a snipe. In fact I'm my own biggest critic, I really am. Because my own standards are so high, I criticise myself behind the scenes more than perhaps I should, according to people who know me well.

The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it's not possible to write criticism if you're making films.

Well, I'm not a critic, I'm just a worker. So, I'm always grateful for anything the critics say - good or bad.

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

My inner critic who had begun piping up about how hopeless I was and how I didn't know to write.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

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

I'll probably never put out another album because I'm a tough critic of my work, and I don't think I could come up to those standards any more.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

The only critic is a full house.

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

I don't need a critic to tell me I'm an actor. I make my own way. Nobody's my boss. Nobody's ever been my boss.

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.

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.