The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from…

“Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

— D.H. Lawrence

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

— D. H. Lawrence

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

— Clive Bell

Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had…

— Stephen Potter

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

— Edward Abbey

To be a critic, you have to have maybe three percent education, five percent intelligence, two percent style, and 90 percent gall and egomania…

— Judith Crist

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

— Frederic Raphael

I remember the early 1980s, when I first got one of these fabulous film critic jobs. The downside was sitting through 'Splatteria III: The…

— Stephen Hunter

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he…

— Edward Albee

If I weren't an actor, I'd either be a teacher or a critic.

— Dennis Haysbert

The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.

— Joseph Conrad

“The composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelting…

— Samuel Johnson

I am my biggest critic. Even in films where people said they liked me, I have disliked myself.

— Samantha Akkineni

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But…

— Whitney Balliett

I am absolutely my own biggest critic.

— Lando Norris