Lee Siegel Quotes

I wish my readers took less of my time - about a third of my working time goes to them - but I love and need them all.

I've always published a range of responses to my work in the letters section of my comic book.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.

I don't read the critics.

Most of the people who write to me are really clever, really engaged. They just want to say that they have read my book and liked it.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

I do take things away from reading reviews. I think they keep you honest.

It's difficult sometimes to go and see a show and enjoy it and not go and see a show and critique it.

Nothing that readers say or do strikes me as a nuisance. Anyone who cracks open a book of mine is, to me, a gem.

The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside

Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.

Criticism is not construction, it is observation.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.

Doubt is an element of criticism, and the tendency of criticism is necessarily skeptical.

Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.

Social media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.

Chats are so new to newspapers, historically. But they're so incredibly valuable because editors/reporters/columnists get to find out what's on the minds of our readers, what you think we should be writing about, what ticks you off, what makes you happy. Sometimes it can confirm what you think readers are interested in; sometimes it can turn you around 180 degrees.

Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise.

It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism. And there's so many expectations involved, too. You're going in to see the latest Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick film, you really have high hopes, and you can't help but find that it's not exactly what you had in your head going in. Until you can watch it again, you can't accept the work for what it intends to be. It takes at least a second viewing.

The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.

Readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.