I don't consider that I have to judge any of the movies I make all the time, but people are always asking me, 'What's your favorite movie?' And I never know what to say.
I get a great laugh from artists who ridicule the critics as parasites and artists manqués — sucha horrible joke. I can’t imagine a more perfect art form, a moreperfect career than criticism. I can’t imagine anything more valuableto do.
Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?
I don't feel any real animosity towards critics when they write negative things. I think some are more perceptive than others. Some are very knowledgeable about painting. But it isn't something I have any influence over, so there isn't any point in worrying about it.
A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
Surely when a man is painting a picture he ought not refuse to hear any man's opinion... Since men are able to form a true judgement as to the works of nature, how much more does it behoove us to admit that they are able to judge our faults.
I don't think it's good, culturally, to base all critical judgments on a single performance.
While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.
The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.
Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.
Someday I suspect, when Jesus has definitely got me for a sunbeam, my works may be adequately assessed.
For instance, when I go to the premiere on Tuesday I probably won't watch the film at all - I'll be watching the audience just to see their reaction to different moments, what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong, stuff like that.
When you feel like you've had a good show, you go backstage and you talk to yourself about it, and if you have a bad show you talk to yourself about it.
Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.
Artistic judgments are silly if expressed as dogmas, at least until we get an "artometer" which can measure objectively how many micro-michelangelos or kilo-homers of genius a given artifact has in it.
While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate him by his best.
The ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on Freudian guesswork.
In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Over and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, 'What is to become of painting if the critics withhold their lash?
Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.
It's like this, by not giving my album a classic rating, you diminish your magazine's credibility. And that's real.
