Critic Quotes

I won't quit until I get run over by a truck, a producer or a critic.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.

You don't need a critic to tell you people aren't laughing.

I wish I could be like Shaw who once read a bad review of one of his plays, called the critic and said: 'I have your review in front of me and soon it will be behind me.'

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic.

If I were less than honest as a critic, I think people would spot that right away, and it would destroy my credibility.

When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.

A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

I never knew any painter worthy of the name who paid the smallest attention to what a critic says, even in conversation.

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.

Critics are entitled to have an opinion, but how can they judge how comfortable a building is? No critic is smart enough to judge how a building will perform over time.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

Whenever a critic mentions the salary of an actor, I'm thinking, He's not talking about the movie.

At first, I wasn't sure whether I'd be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it would be something like that.

According to one critic, my works looked like scraped billboards. I went to look at the billboards and decided that more billboards should be scraped.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife - a tyrannical midwife.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

Also, many consumers consider a critic to be like God Almighty.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

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.

I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

I find you write with one person in mind. Usually for me that one person is my wife, because she's my most severe critic and understands best what I'm trying to do.

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.

The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.