Critic Quotes

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.

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

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'm a very vicious critic of myself.

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.

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.

The only critic is a full house.

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.

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

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.

The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.

Be a doer and not a critic.

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.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

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

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

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

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

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

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.