Quotes About Critique

I never hand in a book until it's completed. Richard Jackson then reads it and asks me to clarify murky points. We work very well together. He knows how hard to push, and I know how hard to push back. He's the only person who can criticize my work without me throwing a hissy fit.

There is nothing wrong with having a difference of opinion, or throwing a little shade every now and then.

Some couture collections have everything including the kitchen sink! Everything gets thrown on to make it look expensive. I find it grotesque when clothes hit you in the face and there's no room for fault. But I don't expect to turn things around all by myself. I'm not a saint.

I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.

'Tropic Thunder' I think is a great film.

If you're satirizing something, you're hitting at something that's real and true, and putting it on its head, and we did that with 'Tropic Thunder.'

The artist doesn't really think about consequences - he or she does the work, stands back and looks at and thinks, 'Hmm, that could have worked better like this.' But as a person who needs to sell tickets to do the next work, one needs to analyze how it does or does not hit its mark.

There has to be a mathematical explanation for how bad that tie is.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it you are lost.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

This music won't do. There's not enough sarcasm in it.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

An old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau doubted it, complaining that the rise of commerce expanded hierarchies of wealth that both morally enervated the rich and fed disorder, even if they left the poor better off.

The sad truth is, S—, most people are not writers. This has nothing to do with literacy—or intelligence, or general culture. There are people who can correct the grammar, spelling, diction, and style of a college English paper with the best of them—who are still not writers. Indeed, most of what gets published in books, magazines, and newspapers is not written by real writers—which is one reason why so much of it is so bad.

That other girl who was going to play Kate? God rest her soul, but she was god-awful.

Communism," I observed, "is a pile of wank.

We're all generous, but with different things, like time, money, talent - criticism.

Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.

I don't have time to beat around the bush. The health-care plan as proposed by Mrs. Clinton is socialism. There's no soft way to peddle it. There is not other way to describe it.

I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?

Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way.