I think testing films are a great tool. And I think showing them to people that you value their opinion is important, but once you give over to what reviewers think, that's tricky. You don't know what their agenda is; it's so subjective. You have got to make sure you are asking someone's opinion who you know.
Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.
I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.
Most critical fault-finding, when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself -- thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done.
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
I really think there's a difference between how men critics see things than how women tend to. And I don't want to make that - it's not a generality and I don't want to say that, but I just feel - I know I do the same thing. There are certain things that I just am not that interested in. Certain kinds of films - I just don't enter them.
To many people, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.
There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.
