Stephen Schwartz Quotes

Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Most people respond to my paintings quite generously, but there have been cases where I think people - a few critics in particular - were actually moved by the work but were disturbed by the feelings it evoked, so they attacked it. Some people find the realm of my work quite uncomfortable.

If your work doesn't speak to people, it's beyond comprehension and risible, but if people engage with it, you become tarred with the brush of populism.

People can love you, or they can hate you. It really doesn't matter.

I don't think anyone likes anything of mine. At the end of the day, I love it, but just because I love it... I happen to love broccoli, not a lot of people like broccoli. I always question if somebody else is going to love my films.

I've come to realize that you're going to get criticized no matter what. Somebody will always hate what you write, especially if you write humor for a fairly broad audience. Somebody will always find it not funny and declare you're not funny anymore. And sometimes people are just crazy.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.

There will be people who hate everything you do. And some people will really love it. But that's not really different from the people who really hate it.

Every writer's got to pay some attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of what the audience feels about his work.

For a while now, I try to ignore the hoopla, because if you buy into that, you have to buy into the criticism. All you can do is put your work out there and move on; you just never know what will come.

I don't really mind criticism in music or in shows and stuff like that at all. I mean, it doesn't really worry me even if it's like out of place. At least it's relevant.

Thats the worst thing, I don't really care if people say I'm a bad actor, I can like work on that, but if they just say that he's ugly thats just like “oh.. really?

I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'

Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

There's always going to be someone who hates you. There's always going to be people who love you. It's a risk in either direction.

A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.

People will love you. People will hate you. And none of it will have anything to do with you.

Frankly, I get much more sensitive about what's written about me than how I look in a photo. I'm so used to people seeing my image in plays and films that what they think about how I look is none of my business. If they says, "Hey, he doesn't look good," I'm like, Whatever, because I know I look different from day to day. But if you're up there putting your heart into something and people reject your performance, that's very painful. The written word can kick your ass.

Seems like there's always someone who disapproves. They'll judge it like they know about me and you.

I've been slagged off completely by the art world and I don't know whether fancy being slagged off by the literary world as well. It's just too much.

Not everybody is going to like what I do or get what I do. With as much positive, you always get the negative to deal with. I get that as well. Most of the time, I'm very honored to have a fan base that they react to my songs. My songs speak to a lot of them.