Quotes About Critics

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

And so the denunciations of critics who say the pessimist should kill himself or be decried as a hypocrite make every kind of sense in a world of card-carrying or crypto optimists. Once this is understood, the pessimist can spare himself from suffering more than he need at the hands of "normal people," a confederation of upstanding creatures who in concert keep the conspiracy going.

When authors and critics talk of the sublime, they see not how nearly it borders on the ridiculous.

Of the fifteen letters ascribed to Ignatius (Bishop of Antioch after 69 A. D.), eight have been rejected by Christian writers as being forgeries, having no authority whatever. "The remaining seven epistles were accounted genuine by most critics, although disputed by some, previous to the discoveries of Mr. Cureton, which have shaken, and indeed almost wholly destroyed the credit and authenticity of all alike." [436:3]

Sometimes you look at the critics and say, 'Nobody else was telling me that, but you were.'

I know a lot of procedurals have huge viewership, yet they're never nominated for awards.

I have been in a lot of movies, but none of them are critics' darlings, you might say.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Critics can be your most important friend. I don't read criticism of my stuff only because when it's bad, it's rough-and when it's good, it's not good enough.

Have you ever noticed how most critics disagree with the public? That should tell you a lot about critics.

The great mystery to me is how restaurant critics think they can get away with doing their job without anybody noticing who they are.

I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.

Critics are eager to discover a new voice. For some reason they're just as eager to be disappointed by a second novel.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

When highbrow critics accused Time of practicing personality journalism, Luce replied that Time did not invent the genre, the Bible did.

Scott Fitzgerald has the one thing that a novelist needs: a truly seeing eye. He sees so clearly, in fact, that his latest book has embarrassed those critics who have come to look to him for entertainment, not for such deeply searching stuff as this. What does it matter that Tender Is The Night fails as a novel?—which it does. While it lasts, it is the most brilliant and heart-breaking performance you will find in recent fiction.

What the critics don't seem to recognize is that the Paris agreement itself was a huge failure. It contained no uniform commitments and no enforcement provisions. Sure, the whole world signed. But onto what? A voluntary set of vaporous promises. China pledged to 'achieve the peaking of [carbon dioxide] emissions around 2030.' Meaning that they rise for another 13 years.

In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.

Of course, critics asked what a novelist was doing on the serious editorial page. After all, I was no intellectual with grey hair. I couldn't answer them. They were probably right at some level. However, this was destiny. This was meant to happen.

you're wrong, you will suffer for it. If you're right, you will find happiness. You have to be the one to decide. "Who are you to know?" It's your future at stake. You have to know. Freedom comes only from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue. — David Seabury

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.