A Quote by Walter Kirn

The best critic needn't be right, just interesting. — © Walter Kirn
The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
I never wanted to do music to get girls, right, to get popular, or anything like that. I really love music and I want to make it better the best I can. I can tell when something's real, or when something's put together. I can just feel it. So I'm my own worst critic and harshest critic and I just want to put honest music out there.
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.
The way I try to explain it the best is that if Critic A from publication A hates our show, and Critic B from publication B loves our show, what are we supposed to do with that? We have to just respect everyone's opinions and go on making the show we want to make. I've never worked on a show that was altered by critical reception. You just can't afford to do that. So in that regard, it's actually no different that working in theater. It's just a lot more voices.
I like debate and argument, so I'm usually all right with disagreement, and I'm even all right if the critic doesn't come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it.
There is no way that my mother hasn't influenced my career. She's my first critic. She's my best critic. She has the best instincts from writing to style to editing, to the visual elements of my career.
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.
The sincere artist is usually his own best critic, but continuous and prolonged work on one painting will sometimes dull his judgment... The critic is in demand, but he must be competent.
I'm my own worst critic and harshest critic and I just want to put honest music out there.
Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.
Everybody wants to be a critic: a critic without the actual accolades to be a critic.
I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.
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.
I've never been competitive with other actors. I've been competitive with myself and I'm my own worst critic, a terrible critic I am, and unless I get something right, I feel very unhappy.
I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.
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.
I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people - I'm not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material.
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