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A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation. (Joseph Addison)
The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D. (Nelson Algren)
A critic is a legless man who teaches running. (Anonymous)
A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste. (Whitney Balliett)
Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don't want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own. (Darby Bannard)
A critic without a good eye is a eunuch in a harem. (Darby Bannard)
-on music critics...
They are quite hopeless - drooling, driveling, doleful, depressing, dropsical drips. (Thomas Beecham)
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves. (Brendan Behan)
I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic. (Clive Bell)
-The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
critic, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him. (Ambrose Bierce)
In the critics' vocabulary, the work "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry. (Jorge Luis Borges)
It is a shame to see in the work of an artist the limitations of his critics. (Robert Brault)
An art critic is someone who hopes to see his ideas translated to canvas without having to learn how to paint. (Robert Brault)
Life is much too short to worry about art critics. (Peter William Brown)
A man must serve his time to every trade / Save censure – critics all are ready made. (Lord Byron)
No person is important enough to make me angry. (Thomas Carlyle)
-to Emile Bernard...
Do not be an art critic, but paint, therein lies salvation. (Paul Cezanne)
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic. (Raymond Chandler)
When I abuse the language, I call it 'art' and call myself an artist; when you abuse the language, I call it 'wrong,' call myself a critic, and assume an air of unimpeachable authority. (Fennec A. Churl)
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets... (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Too nicely, Jonson knew the critic's part; nature in him was almost lost in Art. (John Churton Collins)
Let my enemies devour each other. (Salvador Dali)
A critic never fights the battle; they just go around shooting the wounded. (Tyne Daly)
They call me the painter of dancers. They don't understand that the dancer has been for me a pretext for painting pretty fabrics and for rendering movement. (Edgar Degas)
I've never had an easy relationship with critics. I hold a lot of homicide in my heart. If this was another time, I'd be packing a piece. (Jim Dine)
Critics are those who have failed in literature and art. (Benjamin Disraeli)
I don't feel any real animosity towards critics when they write negative things. I think some are more perceptive than others. Some are very knowledgeable about painting. But it isn't something I have any influence over, so there isn't any point in worrying about it. (Peter Doig)
A non-doer is very often a critic – that is, someone who sits back and watches doers, and then waxes philosophically about how the doers are doing. It's easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk, and change. (Dr. Wayne Dyer)
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder. (George Eliot)
Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did. (Duke Ellington)
You have to seek out situations where you get feedback [about your performance]. It's a myth that you get better when you just do the things you enjoy. (Dr. K. Anders Ericsson)
Now, in reality, the world has paid too great a compliment to critics, and has imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are. (Henry Fielding)
Every critic will see something different. (Hans Frabell)
A good critic is one who narrates the adventures of his mind among masterpieces. (Anatole France)
I sometimes think / His critical judgement is so exquisite / It leaves us nothing to admire except his opinion. (Christopher Fry)
A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them. (Richard Le Gallienne)
A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business. (Paul Gauguin)
Slyly, banteringly, but also overbearingly, the critic – the one who does not swallow anything whole, who waits until posterity has consecrated it before... howling – is among those who howl their admiration the way they howl their insults: don't be afraid, don't tremble – the beast doesn't have any nails or teeth, or even brain: it is stuffed... (Paul Gauguin)
When I stay in the present the inner critic disappears. (Susan Geddes)
Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion. (Robert Genn)
Don't pay any attention to the critics - don't even ignore them. (Samuel Goldwyn)
Talk to your inner critics. Find out what they have to say about you. In most cases, when you hear how extreme and absurd their criticisms are, it will be easier to dismiss them. (Sharon Good)
They never raised a statue to a critic. (Martha Graham)
Critics don't matter. Who cares about Michelangelo's critics? (Irwin Greenberg)
Be your own toughest critic. (Irwin Greenberg)
Influential critics can impact on the art output of a country and may hinder some artists as well as give others a boost. (Pamela Griffith)
Those who can't, critique. (Andrew Hamilton)
One reviewer wrote of Monet's work: "The most absurd daubs in that laughable collection of absurdities" and another stated that "Monet seems to have declared war on beauty." So much for critics. (Andrew Hamilton)
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs. (Christopher Hampton)
I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it. (Ernest Hemingway)
What is a modern poet's fate? / To write his thoughts upon a slate; / The critic spits on what is done, / Gives it a wipe – and all is gone. (Thomas Hood)
I hope my work isn't dismissed by the critics as illustration or photography. (E. J. Hughes)
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself. (Henry James)
There is a certain race of men that either imagine it their duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every work of learning or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of fame, and value themselves upon giving Ignorance and Envy the first notice of a prey. (Samuel Johnson)
Every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom Nature has made weak, and Idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a Critic. (Samuel Johnson)
You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. (Samuel Johnson)
Dance like nobody's watching. (Joseph Joubert)
-Time Magazine...
The media builds you up, and then it tears you down. (Thomas Keller)
The best critic needn't be right, just interesting. (Walter Kirn)
It takes a day or two to leave the critic at the door before we can truly explore. (Antoinette Ledzian)
I intensely dislike the word 'critic,' because it puts you in an antagonistic position to artists. I've learned everything that I know about art from artists... I see myself as an advocate and an activist and a writer. (Lucy Lippard)
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic. (James Russell Lowell)
Some critics claim to know what art has to be and do, and consider it their task to steer art along the path they have chosen. Others receive art gladly, and try to distinguish degrees of excellence... (Norbert Lynton)
If the function of the artist is to see, the first duty of the critic is to understand what the artist saw. (J. E. H. MacDonald)
There are many out there who proudly call themselves critics, but I have come to see that many of those critics have never tested their own skill. (Alison Mackie)
The reproach that superficial people formulate against Manet, that whereas once he painted ugliness, now he paints vulgarity, falls harmlessly to the ground, when we recognize the fact that he paints the truth. (Stephane Mallarme)
I am a critic – as essential to the theatre as ants to a picnic. (Joseph Leo Mankiewicz)
Everybody's an art critic. (Judith Martin)
I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book. (Groucho Marx)
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. (Mignon McLaughlin)
A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit. (Cecil Blount de Mille)
Every time I make a picture the critic's estimate of American public taste goes down another ten percent. (Cecil Blount de Mille)
A drama critic is a person who surprises a playwright by informing him what he meant. (Wilson Mizner)
-Faces
Others don't bother to have opinions of people like me. (Holly Monacelli)
I despise the opinion of the press and the so-called critics. (Claude Monet)
No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times. (Michel de Montaigne)
The lot of critics is to be remembered for what they failed to understand. (George Moore)
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by. (Christopher Morley)
After all his literary efforts had come to nought and he had to wear dark glasses, he became an art critic. (Edvard Munch)
They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity. (Edvard Munch)
Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics – they desire our blood, not our pain. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
I get out my work and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it – how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that the critics can write what they please. (Georgia O'Keeffe)
You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don't. (Georgia O'Keeffe)
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs. (John Osborne)
It is better to get written up in the social columns than in the art critic's reviews. (Charles Pachter)
When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody's bothering to tell you anymore, that's a very bad place to be. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care. (Randy Pausch)
Cynics and critics wake us up. Kindness often covers up the truth and allows us to sleep on in our ignorance. (Wilfred A. Peterson)
Submit your work to interested societies for exhibition where the critics in the light of their physical well-being and according to the extent of their knowledge, may appraise them conveniently. (Walter J. Phillips)
The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged – not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist's only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied. (Walter J. Phillips)
The sincere artist is usually his own best critic, but continuous and prolonged work on one painting will sometimes dull his judgment... The critic is in demand, but he must be competent. (Walter J. Phillips)
Pseudo-critics prefer to direct their remarks to the artist – Heaven forgive them – but one due rather to a common impression that such an attitude is the correct one, that all paintings should be figuratively mutilated, and that all artists are fair game, or really grateful perhaps for a few tips. (Walter J. Phillips)
It does not astonish me that the critics in London relegate me to the lowest rank. Alas! I fear that they are only too justified! (Camille Pissarro)
Nor in the critic let the man be lost. (Alexander Pope)
Some praise at morning what they blame at night, / But always think the last opinion right. (Alexander Pope)
Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working. (Steven Pressfield)
The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write. (Joseph Priestley)
No critic can speak louder than a bill collector. (Bob Ragland)
When one is asked to give a critique or opinion of someone's work, we should feel free to do so honestly and freely... it should then be accepted as a gift... Now if you can't do it intelligently and out of kindness then you probably deserve to be called opinionated. (William F. Reese)
In any critique of a specific work, it should always be about the work and nothing else, not the creator, not the audience. (Stella Reinwald)
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. (Theodore Roosevelt)
No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating. (Harold Rosenberg)
You can lead a fool to a book, but you can't make them think. (J. K. Rowlings)
The fault is in the blamer - Spirit sees nothing to criticize. (Rumi)
The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him. (John Ruskin)
Never to go overboard for an unknown artist is a sign of bad character in a critic. (John Russell)
When a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime. (Charles Saatchi)
A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)
Art criticism everywhere is now at a low ebb, intellectually corrupt, swamped in meaningless jargon, distorted by political correctitudes, anxiously addressed only to other critics and their ilk. (Brian Sewell)
For I am nothing if not critical. (William Shakespeare)
A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned. (George Bernard Shaw)
Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been a statue erected to a critic. (Jean Sibelius)
When I look at new work, my image bank goes into action. I pay careful attention to the names of other artists that flash in my brain as I look at the work. How many other artists exactly come to mind? There's nothing wrong with this up to a point... Obviously, the fewer names that come to mind, the greater the odds that you are looking at something fresh that you haven't quite seen before. (Roberta Smith)
The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best. (Thomas Sowell)
I had a dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya. (Igor Stravinsky)
Diebenkorn was a very good critic, a very tough critic, tough on himself, tough on others. He expected the finest. (Wayne Thiebaud)
Sometimes I'd like everybody who is stuck, or lost, or vacant to stay that way and keep silent for as long as it takes, but that's the critic in me talking. (David Toop)
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience of 4000 critics. (Mark Twain)
-notebook, 1904...
The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it. (Mark Twain)
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car. (Kenneth Tynan)
A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening. (Kenneth Tynan)
The one whose judgment counts most in your life is the one staring back in the glass. (unknown)
Those who say it cannot be done should get out of the way of those doing it. (unknown)
A critic is like a soldier who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded. (Source unknown)
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart. (John Updike)
Be eager to lend a patient ear to the opinions of others and think long and hard whether whoever finds fault has reason or not to censure you. And if the answer is yes, correct the fault. If no, give the impression that you have not heard him, or if he is a man whom you respect, explain to him why he is mistaken. (Leonardo da Vinci)
Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you've got a pretty neck. (Eli Wallach)
Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches. (Andy Warhol)
I read an article on me once that described my machine-method of silk-screen copying and painting: "What a bold and audacious solution, what depths of the man are revealed in this solution!" What does that mean? (Andy Warhol)
Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic – a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us. (Oscar Wilde)
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic. (Oscar Wilde)
Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules. (Robert Anton Wilson)
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