The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action.
John Mason Brown

The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael

The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
E. B. White

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
Eugene Ionesco

The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
Edgar Allan Poe

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
Anatole France

The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy - yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.
Nelson Algren

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.
Isaac Disraeli

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
Allen Tate

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
Mark Twain

The public is wiser than the wisest critic.
George Bancroft

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.
Harold Bloom

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.
Kenneth Tynan

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.
Frederic Raphael

There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife - a tyrannical midwife.
Stephen Spender

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Virginia Woolf

Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck

Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.
John C. Ransom

Very often the Group actor is a critic when he's acting and an actor when he's criticizing.
Elia Kazan

Well, I'm not a critic, I'm just a worker. So, I'm always grateful for anything the critics say - good or bad.
Mandy Patinkin