Criticism Quotes - Page 43

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

Critics don't want to see directors they like make too much of a left turn. That's good for criticism.

It is folly to censure him whom all the world adores.

Now, as when I made films that were too autobiographical, the problem is how to escape naturalism. If you tell a strictly true story, because the way you are telling it is false, it creates naturalism. But I become a naturalist. And to become a naturalist is something I avoid. It is fake life - that is the problem. It is because we are familiar with situationnisme, and the critique of the spectacle, et cetera, which is a very fair criticism. People who have no life, and who watch this fake life on a screen - it's a very alienated situation. And that's what situationnisme is about.

A self-awareness moment. All of a sudden everything he has done comes flashing into his mind, a self-criticism that is unbearable.

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.

I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").

Why...is the hunter who shoots a deer for venison subject to more criticism than the person who buys a ham at the supermarket? Overall, it is probably the intensively reared pig who has suffered more.

With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.

In my work I have chosen the positive approach. I never think of myself as protesting against something, but rather as witnessing for harmonious living. Those who witness for, present solutions. Those who witness against, usually do not - they dwell on what is wrong, resorting to judgment and criticism and sometimes even name-calling. Naturally, the negative approach has a detrimental effect on the person who uses it, while the positive approach has a good effect

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

Criticism didn't really stop us and it shouldn't ever stop anyone, because critics are only the people who can't get a record deal themselves.

I don't think theory adds to criticism. (Methodology does, for better or worse.) Theory's function is to make criticism self-conscious, maybe even a little sheepish, about its ex cathedra pronouncements.

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.

In religious matters it is now fashionable to define tolerance as the absence of criticism of any standard religion. All too often, this absence of criticism degenerates into a conspicuous absence of thought.

Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef,' I feel, is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant, we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.

Mere abuse is no criticism.

Criticism of a policy is welcome. But in the garb of criticizing a policy, if you allege that the policy was made for corrupt purposes, I reject it.

No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.

All criticism is a form of autobiography

I don't care how unkind the things people say about me so long as they don't say them to my face.

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.