Critical Failure Quotes

Several highly improbable and therefore unforeseen failures.

One little leak becomes a lake, Says the tiny voice in my earpiece

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act, and at that point it'll be painfully aware to everyone.

In film or on stage, in reflecting life through art, an actor has a second take or another day with his or her performance if something goes wrong. Bullfighters are spies crossing into enemy lines. Any mistake, no matter how minor or trivial, is potentially fatal.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

The studio should not have released this film.

The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.

And took for truth the test of ridicule.

When a film fails, the lead actor is always blamed for it.

Whether it is a big ship or small ship, the same size hole placed correctly in the hull can sink it.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

Hardware works best when it matters the least.

[I am] saddened, saddened, that this president [Bush] failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to go to war. Saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country.

The weakest link in a chain is the strongest because it can break it.

I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.

Sometimes Hollywood manages to knock a movie in its teeth so hard that it never manages to get back up.

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.

Everyone starts a film thinking that it would be a big hit. But sometimes it goes haywire.

A lot of praise is given to very mediocre work. Critics have lost their taste, hearing, and eyesight.

I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.

Some have at first for wits, then poets passed, Turned critics next, and proved plain fools at last.

Western intellectual Islamologists have totally failed in their duties as intellectuals. They have betrayed their calling by abandoning their critical faculties when it comes to Islam.

It's quite good when you fall flat on your bum on a creative level. Critics can hate what I do, or I've got something completely wrong, and it's good because that ego thing gets zapped for a while.