Gale Harold Quotes

A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself.

There are good and bad critics like good or bad artists. A good critic says why they didn't like it. A bad critic gives it away that they don't like you as a person. I quite like that as well, because it means that I've won.

An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.

Critics should be looked at simply as commentators.

I don't consider that I have to judge any of the movies I make all the time, but people are always asking me, 'What's your favorite movie?' And I never know what to say.

Indeed, I would feel that an appreciation of the arts in a conscious, disciplined way might help one to do science better.

It's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.

No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do!

When you make a piece, one of the interesting things is hearing what other people think about it.

Hearing other peoples' interpretations of your lyrics, to me, is just a total kick in the pants. Half the time, they're better.

I don't really mind criticism in music or in shows and stuff like that at all. I mean, it doesn't really worry me even if it's like out of place. At least it's relevant.

My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.

When you finish some film and you let it out there, it is completely out of your control. You've done what you've done, you haven't done what you haven't done, and now you are up for judgment. People can be all kinds of ruthless and they can be all kinds of wonderful. The joy in what I do is in the doing of it. And then there is the part where people are either going to see what I've offered and liked it or they are going to see what I've offered and wish they hadn't.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

Very often adverse criticism goes to craft, and that sounds an alarm to which attention should be paid.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.

I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more excellent if good.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.