Quotes About Critic

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

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.

It's what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.

'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.

But alone with my prose I am maker and critic, teacher and student, lazy and specific. Alone with my prose I fail for days and sometimes years and over the course of many drafts. Incapable of finding the truth in memoir, I turn to fiction. Paralyzed by length, I turn to poems. Bucking against short lines I turn to prose again, to truth again, to nonsequential truth because that seems more truthful.

The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy - yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.

Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

I am not a food critic. Or a chef. Or even a professional writer. What I am schooled in the art of, however, is enjoying myself.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

A man becomes a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier

The critic as an alchemist practicing the obscure art of transmuting the futile elements of the real into the shining, enduring gold of truth

I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.

The critic is a prisoner to his own experiences and perspectives, erroneously believing his limited experiences are the sum of all truth

Unfortunately, many regard the critic as an enemy, instead of seeing him as a guide to the truth.

There is almost no human action or decision that cannot be made to look flawed and less sensible in the misleading light of hindsight. It is essential that the critic should keep himself constantly aware of that fact."1

There is almost no human action or decision that cannot be made to look flawed and less sensible in the misleading light of hindsight. It is essential that the critic should keep himself constantly aware of that fact.

Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to 'fix our language forever'—no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility.

Dug from the tomb of taste-refining time, Each form is exquisite, each block sublime. Or good, or bad,-disfigur'd, or deprav'd,- All art, is at its resurrection sav'd All crown'd with glory in the critic's heav'n, Each merit magnified, each fault forgiven.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

A critic is a virgin who would teach Don Juan how to make love.