Critics Quotes
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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.
Michael Caine
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I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.
Teju Cole
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When western books are set in the present, critics seldom call them westerns: the national myth allows the West only a past.
Gerald Haslam
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What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book.
Winifred Holtby
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Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear - that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy - is one of their strengths.
Stephen Carter
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The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
William Faulkner
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I think women are excellent social critics.
Laurie Anderson
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The one thing I do find about serious reviews is that usually they tend to have a point, and that's what I find hurt so much about discerning critics. If the reviews hurt they're probably right on some level.
Sean Lennon
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The Gay News critic wrote that I 'carried the lilt of the Irish without the brogue'.
Stephen Fry
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Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable,"...you know'.
Stephen Fry
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It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
Ethan Canin
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If you only took on roles that had the same qualities, then I suppose it might make a critic feel better, if he can see some kind of bedrock. Perhaps that's the old definition of a star, someone who's always going to come up with the same goods. But it intimates limitation to me and I don't want to think of the job like that.
Miranda Richardson
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Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so.
Gertrude Atherton
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I had my share of critics, and I wash my hands of the whole lot.
Frank Richard Stockton
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I don't expect that the scientific community now embraces and kisses me 'Oh wonderful, great you did!' we have to live with critics, this is normal. Chariots of the Gods was full of speculation, I had 238 question marks. Nobody read the question mark. They always said: Mr. Von Daniken is saying... I did not say, I asked the questions, would that be a posibility? In Chariots of the Gods, I made clear difference between a speculations and facts.
Erich von Däniken
