Top 195 Critic Quotes

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.

I’m my own worst critic and I think everyone in the band is a perfectionist.

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer… Being a critic wasn’t an aspiration of mine.

The Architect is just one of a series of works which examine the confrontation of innocence and experience, illustrating the complex ethics of power that exist between reader and writer, critic and artist, the human and the divine.

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.

One critic called me nothing but a blues singer, as though that was a slight. That is the highest compliment there is.

I’m hard on myself. I’m my biggest critic.

No film critic’s going to say it, but ‘Madagascar 3’ is better than ‘The Artist.’

I suffer from low self-esteem. I had horrible self-esteem growing up. You really have to save yourself because the critic within you will eat you up. It’s not the outside world – it’s your interior life, that critic within you, that you have to silence.

I’m an equal-opportunity critic when it comes to left-wing celebrities sounding off on topics of which they know precious little.

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

I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it’s not possible to write criticism if you’re making films.

You can get a million different opinions from different people, but I always like to watch myself to see what I did and how I performed because the best critic is yourself.

However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I’ve been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It’s just something I’m passionate about.

I’m a perfectionist and my own worst critic.

My dad never told me he loved me, he didn’t give me cuddles. He was my biggest critic all the time. I am a totally different father, I kiss and cuddle my kids every day and tell them I love them, which is terrible because I am making them too soft.

I never really thought of myself as a TV critic. I was presenting TV before I was writing about it.

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

I’m my own severest critic, and I realize when I make mistakes.

I’m always going to be my worst critic.

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

I write and film history; I don’t make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.

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?

I’m not a critic. I’m an actor. I see the role I get given on the page. I try to bring it to life as best as I can.

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

You can’t be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based ethanol, before agricultural subsidies. I mean, even McCain was a critic of ethanol, but when he got to Iowa, he was singing a different tune.

Look, I’m my own worst critic. I’ve made mistakes in areas that I need to improve – most notably, turning the ball over.

I believe my biggest critic is me only.

I don’t need a critic to tell me I’m an actor. I make my own way. Nobody’s my boss. Nobody’s ever been my boss.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Your humble critic confesses that he has been wrestling with ‘weight issues’ since leaving college lo these, uh, several years ago, so it’s hard to be receptive to the moralistic scolding and patronizing encouragement offered endlessly by the allegedly well-meaning.

I realized that everybody is a critic. They’re going to say they hate you, they love you, they this, they that, but at the end of the day, no matter what, I have to be confident in myself as a man and an artist.

I feel very lucky I don’t have to be a critic.

I’ll probably never put out another album because I’m a tough critic of my work, and I don’t think I could come up to those standards any more.

I’m always my worst critic.

The Web critic relies on his or her readers for attentiveness and approval.

I like debate and argument, so I’m usually all right with disagreement, and I’m even all right if the critic doesn’t come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it.

I’m my biggest critic of myself when I make mistakes.

I think whether you’re a movie critic and have seen a million movies, or you’re just a normal popcorn movie watcher, you can tell the difference when someone is just laying it on too thick.

Most definitely a daddy’s girl… but I am close to both my parents. Amma is my biggest fan; Achan is my biggest critic, so it is difficult to please my father. I am always trying to make him proud.

I own one movie by fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, because I have to. You can’t be a movie critic with a collection of six or seven hundred DVDs that includes everything from ‘Tokyo Story’ to ‘Poison Ivy: The New Seduction’ and not have a Bergman movie.

My daughter, Lila, is my style critic. She’ll say, ‘No, Mummy, you can’t wear that.’ She’s very good. I do trust her instinct.

I knew there was going to be pressure on me with the captaincy. I knew people would be writing about my performances more than anyone else’s, but that’s not a problem because I have my dad telling me about my performance every single game, and he is my biggest critic.

I’ve realized my best and worst critic is my director.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

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.

I’m not a critic, I’m not there to tell people what they should think about something – I just want to kind of enthuse about stuff to let people make their own mind up about it.

I’ve always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.

As an actor, I’m my own worst critic, but after awhile, really, when you watch ‘Moonrise Kingdom’, it’s such a fantastic film that you sort of get sucked into the story, and then you kind of forget about everything else.

I completely love music. I used to be the music critic at ‘The Improper Bostonian.’ It’s just something I’ve always loved very deeply.

I relate to the feeling that Da Vinci was often plagued by the idea that what he did wasn’t good enough, that he was his harshest critic. He’d sometimes destroy what he was working on.

I always loved ‘The Critic’ and how specifically ‘New York’ it was.

Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions – on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets – simply aren’t up to scratch.

I’m probably my biggest critic.

I don’t feel I’ve had a decent critic ever on the East coast.

All of those Shield guys, who came in protected, have done nothing but deliver, in my opinion, and I am a harsh critic of everyone.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

I am strongly convinced that the people or society is the best and the most unerring critic.

I’m a novelist, a critic, an essayist – I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It’s a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.

To me, a critic is some loser who has no idea… someone with an opinion. We all have opinions. No offense, but what makes them dictate what is cool and what is not.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can’t do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

I think I am my own biggest critic, yeah.

Everyone’s a critic: when you are doing something good, everybody wants to bring you down, and that’s something I’ve been told. People want to see you do good, but not too good.

In the dear dead days beyond recall, when I was in my prime as a film critic, the industry was booming. Hollywood, to give them their due, always called it the industry, through quite a few imagined it as an art form and went through several hours regularly at tiresome films in the sacred cause of art.