A CHEAP SHOT

CHEAP SHOTS
As one artist to a critic.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard
-John Steinbeck-

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
- Elbert Hubbard -

Presenting theater in the absence of vigorous, informed criticism is like playing tennis with the net down.
-Robert Frost - (Italics mine...tqf)

Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you've got a pretty neck.
- Eli Wallach -

I don't mind what the opposition say of me so long as they don't tell the truth about me. But when they descend to telling the truth about me I consider that this is taking an unfair advantage.
- Mark Twain - Speech, 1879

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt -

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson -

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
- H. M. Warner -

One mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself.
- Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court -

Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you'll be a mile from them, and you'll have their shoes.
- Jack Handey Deep Thoughts -

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
- Robert Frost -

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
- Martin Luther King Jr. -

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.
- Brendan Behan -

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
- George Eliot -

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs
- John Osborne -

If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth -

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
- John Updike -

When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
- Goethe -

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
- Edward Albee -

Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.
- Peter Ustinov -

Some critics are like chimneysweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from the nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing out from the top of the house, as if they had built it.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -

Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticise the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to run a foot race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with. Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave.
- Mark Twain - "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper"

Critics generally come to be critics not by reason of their fitness for this, but of their unfitness for anything else.
-Samuel Butler -

“One battle doesn’t make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.”
- A.E. Hotchner -

I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value--certainly no large value...However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

Critics complained it wasn’t opera, it wasn’t a musical. You give someone something delicious to eat and they complain because they have no name for it.
- Rouben Mamoulian - Recalling his direction of the 1935 production of Porgy and Bess -

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It’s like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don’t have any control over the action going on upstairs.
- Robert Hughes -