Quotes About Critic

Hell hath little fury like that of a critic who sees a writer make it big.

As we passed his table, I saw that the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work - and it's author - in bondage.

I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.

I point out to her that pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn't have to face anything, nor does she have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again. Her inner critic serves her: I don't have to take any action because I'm worthless.

It is not unusual to make a single work the opportunity for passing definitive judgment upon an author. This is not our view of the duty of a critic. He is limited to the book before him, and all departures from it are impertinences.

Don't you see the inevitability of this moment? I mean we're talking serious process here, man. The perfect critic stepping forth from the demimonde of the war and blowing the heart of the painting to rubble, and then turning his weapon on the man whose actions have been the pure contrary of the work's formal imperative.' 'I'm outta film,' said the mestizo cameraman.

He is, professionally, an arbiter of comedy. "A sort of drama critic?" "More what you would term an umpire. The members of the audience are given a set of rules and the rules constitute the comedy.

Recognizing masterpieces is the job of the critic, not writing competent reviews of the unimportant.

Don't ask me my opinions on art, because I don't have any. Aesthetic concerns have played a relatively minor role in my life, and I have to smile when a critic talks, for example, of my "palette". I find it impossible to spend hours in galleries analyzing and gesticulating.

On the whole, however, the critic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimes imagined. He is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He is not concerned with getting rid of dross except in so far as it hides the gold. In other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a subsidiary affair. None of the best critics have been men of destructive minds. They are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowers than with the weeds.

Un Dios escrupuloso o crítico, pensó Wilbur Larch, nos mataría a todos.

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.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

PERFECTION, n. An imaginary state of quality distinguished from the actual by an element known as excellence; an attribute of the critic.

A sweeping statement is the only statement worth listening to. The critic without faith gives balanced opinions, usually about second-rate writers.

The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him.

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behavior reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.

There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.

Editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast.

Le Figaro's Albert Wolff,

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

In short, the critic is not an owner, because he still struggles with ideas as with powerful strangers, as the Christian is not the owner of his "bad desires" as long as he has to fight them; for the one who battles against vice, vice exists.