critic

Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales.

Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.

Unless you are a restaurant critic... nobody cares what you had for lunch.

Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and __ree spirit_ and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse.

Discernment is the son of good judgment and the father of self-control. When mixed with an already clear conscience, the ability to read the true motives of a critic keeps one's conscience both clear and at ease.

CRITIC OR CITRIC?Anagram of ordinary passing judgement on talentedKamil Ali

Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership issue. Who, other than its creator, is to say what a work of fiction means or is worth? It can take years to write a novel and only a few hours for a critic, or a reviewer rushing for a tight deadline, to trash it.

A cowardly critique starts with a compliment.

I__e often been criticised, but never critically wounded

These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

No-one ever built a statue of a critic.

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

It's always funny that you can try and try again to steal all your critics' ammo, predict their responses, but no matter what, they'll still have a water gun stashed somewhere.

Plenty of people will think you're crazy, no matter what you do. Don't let that stop you from finding the people who think you're incredible__he ones who need to hear your voice, because it reminds them of their own. Your tribe. They're out there. Don__ let your critics interfere with your search for them.

Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic.

He who frowns when they say that he sucks shouldn__ smile when they say that he rocks.

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.