In a person's career, well, if you're process-oriented and not totally outcome-oriented, then you're more likely to be success. I often say 'pursue excellence, ignore success.' Success is a by-product of excellence.
Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest!
If you don't have critics, you probably don't have success either.
Success is always the best answer to critics.
The greatest dangers have their allurements, if the want of success is likely to be attended with a degree of glory. Middling dangers are horrid, when the loss of reputation is the inevitable consequence of ill success.
When critics love your film, you love critics. When they hate your film, you hate critics. It's the same everywhere, but maybe especially in France, where we have pretty good critics, except for three or four newspapers that are really dogmatic.
There are television critics, movie critics, and theater critics too who I like and who I follow and I get genuinely bummed when they don't like something that I've written because I usually agree with them.
I don't really think about the critics or the commercial success.
When critics ask you if you feel vindicated by other critics - I didn't like critics then, and I don't like them now. There you go. I've always been outside the mainstream, and it stayed that way.
I like to have success experiences rather than failure experiences. So I'm more likely to compete in things I'm good at, and more likely to spend time on the things I expect to succeed at.
We need to get past the point where being black and a male means that I am likely to mug you for your wallet, likely to have a minus 15 on my IQ, likely to not go to college and likely to wear my pants below my arse.
I don't really give in to the critics because critics are always going to criticize, and what have they done? A person who has never done nothing can't really care nothing about doing something. So as far as the critics, I don't care what they think. I don't have time to give to critics.
With certain ideas, you can predict commercial success. So with a 'Toy Story 3' or a 'Cars 2,' you know the idea is more likely to have financial success. But if you go down that path too far, you become creatively bankrupt because you're just trying to repeat yourself.
To me, success means either the audience have to like your movie or the critics have to.
I read reviews of critics I respect and feel I can learn something from. Right now there are a lot of bottom-feeder critics who just have access to a computer and don't necessarily have an academic or cinema background that I can detect, so I tend to ignore that and stay with the same top-tier critics that I've come to respect. I like reading a good review - it doesn't have to be favorable, but a well-thought-out one - because I very much appreciate the relationship of directors and critics.
I always think I'm the Tom Cruise of music - a lot of success and fans, but no critics, darling.