A Quote by Michael Hersch

A critic can serve as guide. I think there's an understanding amongst the public that critics have their own preferences and dislikes.

Michael Hersch

Quote Topics

Amongst Critic Critics Dislikes Guide Own Preferences Public Serve Think Understanding

Quote Author

Michael Hersch
American - Composer
Born: June 25, 1971

You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.

Edward Albee

Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.

Georges Braque

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

Whitney Balliett

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.

Ruth Reichl

Music critics are, for the most part, bitter people who are intent at dragging people down for being successful at what they want to do, which is probably music. The oddity of being a critic is: You don't get a diploma, you just decide you're a critic. If someone listens to your opinion rather than their own, it's their mistake. Any critic's top 10, any year, it's something controversial or something that will make them look hipper-than-thou. The whole critic game, we've never played.

Paul Stanley

I'm my own worst critic. I could tell the critics a thing or two about my shows.

Jennifer Saunders

I just kind of shoot the finger to the critics. I don't give sh - what a critic says. To me a critic is some loser who has no idea... someone with an opinion. We all have opinions.

Vanilla Ice

Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.

Henry Louis Gates

I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.

Quentin Tarantino

A lot of times the mainstream public loves something, critics will hate it and then they'll think the public is stupid and they're above the public.

Jim Norton

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences...I f you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind.

Sengcan

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.

Irwin Shaw

Trying to do good to people without God's help is no easier than making the sun shine at midnight. You discover that you've got to abandon all your own preferences, your own bright ideas, and guide souls along the road our Lord has marked out for them. You mustn't coerce them into some path of your own choosing.

Thérèse of Lisieux

There's lots of room to be your own worse critic. It's just you, so I think that's inherit, that voice that's always that's there monitoring everything you do. It's definitely worse; the critic is harder when it's just you. If you're doing a show, then the critic can blame the other actors your with.

Jason Graae

I don't think the role of the critic has changed very much. In the most positive sense, the music critic is one who helps the public navigate what's out there, especially in bringing attention to things they otherwise wouldn't hear about, or to provide a new window into something familiar.

Michael Hersch

If you make the choice to serve the public, public service, then serve the public, not yourself.