Critics Quotes - Page 39

• Be your own worst critic. When things go wrong it's tempting to shift the blame. Don't. Accept responsibility. People will appreciate it, and you will find out what you're capable of.

  Paul Arden

  Responsibility, People, Appreciate

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• A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy for a role you're planning to leave. You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret you want future critics to say you played the character better.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Baby, Character, Play

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• 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.

  Neil Gaiman

  Virginia, Ruins, Restaurants

  Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Theodora Goss, Peter S. Beagle, Richard Parks (2013). “Fantasy: The Best of the Year: 2006 Edition”, p.180, Wildside Press LLC

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• You can be our critic. Would you dig that? (Yes, he was the last Man in America who could say “dig” with a straight face without referring to the process of using a tool to remove dirt from the ground.)

  Jordan Sonnenblick

  Men, America, Tools

  Jordan Sonnenblick (2010). “Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie”, p.108, Scholastic Inc.

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• I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)

  William James

  Tired, Men, Biographies

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• Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.

  Richard Dawkins

  Hypocrite, Feet, Flying

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not critics to their judgment, too?

  Alexander Pope

  Judgment, Wit

  Alexander Pope (1825). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope: With a Sketch of the Author's Life”, p.49

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• Literary critics make natural detectives.

  A. S. Byatt

  Detectives, Natural

  "Possession". Book by A. S. Byatt, 1990.

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• My husband is my most ruthless critic... sometimes he will say, 'It's been said better before.' Of course it has. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Husband, Musical, Trying

  FaceBook post by Madeleine L'Engle from May 06, 2016

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• Without my protectionm your journey is doomed before you begin.' Great! I thought. Even the snake is a critic!

  E.D. Baker

  Journey, Snakes, Doomed

  E. D. Baker (2010). “The Frog Princess”, p.74, A&C Black

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• The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.

  Ezra Pound

  Mean, Men, Made

  Ezra Pound (2010). “ABC of Reading”, p.22, New Directions Publishing

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• Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin And there's no tellin' who That it's namin' For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin'.

  Bob Dylan

  Eye, Winning, Wheels

  Song: The Times They Are A-Changin', Album: The Times They Are A-Changin', 1964

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• This Church is true. It will weather every storm that beats against it. It will outlast every critic who rises to mock it. It was established by God our Eternal Father for the blessing of His sons and daughters of all generations. It carries the name of Him who stands as its head, even the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. It is governed and moves by the power of the priesthood. It sends forth to the world another witness of the divinity of the Lord. Be faithful, my friends. Be true. Be loyal to the great things of God which have been revealed in this dispensation.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Daughter, Jesus, Father

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• The search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where God wants him to be a pupil. What he wants from the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise- does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.

  C. S. Lewis

  Attitude, Humble, Men

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• My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That’s why I didn’t study literature

  Haruki Murakami

  Lonely, Book, Reading

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• I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

  Leonard Bernstein

  World, Statues

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• The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Jobs, Wall, Blow

  KURT VONNEGUT, JR (1969). “SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE”

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• What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

  Jane Yolen

  Book, Heart, Scholar

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• The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Artist, Two, Way

  Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) ch. 1

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• When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Criticism, Together

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• Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

  Edward Abbey

  Book, Fate, People

  Edward Abbey (2006). “Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast”

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• When I was your age, art was a lonely thing: no galleries, no collecting, no critics, no money. We didn't have mentors. We didn't have parents. We were alone. But it was a great time, because we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.

  John Logan

  Lonely, Art, Parent

  John Logan (2012). “Red”, p.34, Oberon Books

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• I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Art, Struggle, Understanding

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• Aren't maids the ultimate art critics?

  John Waters

  Art, Maids, Ultimate

  John Waters (2010). “Role Models”, p.235, Macmillan

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• To straddle the middle ground and win elections, we have to be in charge of the political agenda. This can only be done by not being beaten in the argument with our critics. They complain that I come down too hard on their arguments. But wrong ideas have to be challenged before they influence public opinion and make for problems. Those who try to be clever at the expense of the government should not complain if my replies are as sharp as their criticisms.

  Lee Kuan Yew

  Clever, Winning, Government

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