Critic Quotes

Time is still the best critic, and patience the best teacher. (Frédéric Chopin)
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car. View quote
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. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife - a tyrannical midwife. View quote
Stephen Spender
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern. View quote
Henry Miller
A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation. View quote
Joseph Addison
Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good. View quote
P. G. Wodehouse
A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant. View quote
Wilson Mizner
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true. View quote
William Shenstone
It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things. (Theodore Roosevelt)
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. View quote
D. H. Lawrence
Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play. View quote
John Steinbeck
Time is the only critic without ambition. View quote
John Steinbeck
A good critic is one who narrates the adventures of his mind among masterpieces. View quote
Anatole France
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising. View quote
Pauline Kael
No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite. View quote
Federico Fellini
I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything. View quote
Arthur Miller
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things. View quote
W. Somerset Maugham
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. (Susan Sontag)
I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is. View quote
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five. View quote
James McNeill Whistler
I lost faith in the Oscars the first year I was a movie critic - the year that Bonnie and Clyde didn't win. View quote
Roger Ebert
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic. View quote
James Russell Lowell