Criticism Role Quotes

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

If you think about it, critics are an unnecessary life-form on the planet Earth, and here's why: because it's a job without credentials. You don't have to go to school.

Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

I feel very lucky I don't have to be a critic.

It is not simply the individual who benefits from and is protected by rights, but the society as a whole. Protected freedoms to dissent and criticize those in power help keep abuses of power in check. They combat tendencies of elites to become isolated from and ignorant of the people they deeply affect through their decisions.

In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world - in America first but also in Europe - has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance.

Critics have a job to do. I understand that. It's not just to criticize. They're trying to interpret art for the public.

One of the things that happens to you if you write about restaurants - one of the reasons restaurant critics are the real heroes - is that whenever anyone has a grievance about any aspect of the business, they tell you about it.

Criticism will need an injection of humility that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system.