Quotes About Critic

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.

I had decided to delight the audience by playing my soprano saxophone for their delectation (years later, a music critic would describe my playing at a concert as "excruciating").

The words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.

A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.

The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience--that is to say, they must be subjective.

We shouldn't call a critic a murderer just because it is his duty to sign death certificates. —MARCEL REICH-RANICKI, DIE ANWALTE DER LITERATUR,

Any critic who complains about the monotony of what he is being paid to look at is really complaining about the condition of his own soul.

A statement on the political responsibility of the critic: the critic must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present.

Upon reflection, Henry found it difficult to disagree with Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and frequent critic of the Lincoln administration, when he complained that the president had emancipated slaves where the Union could not free them and had kept them enslaved in places where the Union did enjoy the power to give them liberty.

A critic should always strive to recapture the sense of wonder and surprise with which he first beheld a now-familiar work of art.

You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.

Studying art history is actually one of the few ways of getting a good job in the arts sector. It's hard to be a museum curator without it, work in any senior position in an auction house or gallery, or become a serious art critic.

'Chef' is a dish of arroz con pollo served with a smile but not much style. The critic in the film would give it a low grade, for agreeability without ambition.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.

Some people find fault like there is a reward for it

I'm not a pundit. I'm not an analyst.

I am a great admirer of other actors, but I never compete with other actors. I always compete with what I did last, and I'm my own most vicious critic. So I'm always trying to do it better.

A young critic is like a boy with a gun; he fires at every living thing he sees. He thinks only of his own skill, not of the pain he is giving.

It is the masculine values that prevail… 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.

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a well known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older than the rest.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor , Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "... a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution?

I used to be so hard on myself. So hard on myself. Just my own worst critic to the nth degree. Absolutely undermining my confidence in every moment. Bad tape in my head all the time.