Critics Quotes
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We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.
William Butler Yeats
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With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
Ray Bradbury
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Like most people, I've always felt using words like 'best' when applied to art is a fun way for critics to stay busy at the end of the year, and I guess a good way to help get ratings for awards shows, which is fine.
Steven Van Zandt
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The critics can say stupid things and we can enjoy them, if we have the legitimate feeling of superiority - the satisfaction of a duty accomplished.
Paul Gauguin
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Poetry is often very critical of the culture from which it emerges. Quite often literary critics of a nationalist bent talk up the national culture, in a way that the literary texts don't. Poetry can bring out areas of denial and repression.
Edna Longley
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The passive idler of all men in the world is the most difficult to please. Those who do the least themselves are always the severest critics upon the noble achievements of others.
Elias Lyman Magoon
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Too often critics seem more intent on seeking new ways to alter Congress than to truly learn how it functions. They might well profit from the advice of Thomas Huxley, who said a century ago: Sit down before facts as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notionor you shall learn nothing.
Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr.
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The Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.
George Eliot
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Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. It's not like the conductor in the symphony orchestra performance because he's standing in front of you waiving his arms. You now what he's doing. You don't know what the director is doing unless you know a lot about theater and even then you can only deduce it. You know it when you go to rehearsal. You really know it when they are rehearsing something of yours. I learned more in the rehearsals for The Letter than I have ever dreamed of know in the theater as a critic. If it doesn't make me a better critic, I'm an idiot.
Terry Teachout
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But then when I'm in a halfway successful movie, it irritates the hell out of the critics in New York, because they'd like to kill my pictures if they could. So maybe I'm pretty good in the movie. Then they use all these words like I'm 'surprisingly' good, or 'shockingly enough,' I'm good. It's like I crawled out from under a magazine and they're surprised I can act.
Burt Reynolds
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There's a radical - and wonderful - new idea here... that all children could and should be inventors of their own theories, critics of other people's ideas, analyzers of evidence, and makers of their own personal marks on the world. Its an idea with revolutionary implications. If we take it seriously.
Deborah Meier
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I DJ and I'm a harsh critic of DJs.
Russell Peters
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Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.
Russell Baker
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A lot of praise is given to very mediocre work. Critics have lost their taste, hearing, and eyesight.
Steven Berkoff
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To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
Nelson Algren
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People are very harsh critics of animated humans.
Henry Selick
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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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A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.
Paul Gauguin
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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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The bias among architecture critics isn't against skyscrapers per se, but against the way in which their design is so heavily dictated by economic considerations - the way in which skyscrapers are real estate before they are architecture.
Paul Goldberger
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It could've been made thirty years ago or forty-five years ago actually, or it could've been made last week. And, I think the level of our craft was such that we're appreciated, at leased by fans if not critics. Critics have never appreciated our band.
Doug Fieger
The Knack