James Lipton Quotes

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Criticism is something that you have to take, regardless of what you do. Even if you go out there and try to make the most vanilla, non-offensive TV show possible, people are going to criticize you for doing that. It's just part of the game.

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

I don't feel I've had a decent critic ever on the East coast.

I do not wanna write a song like 'Coathanger' so Andrew Breitbart can rage against me on his web site. It's not my idea of fun.

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

Coming from The Disney Channel, anything I do is going to offend somehow, somewhere, somehow.

Obviously I know if you're putting yourself out there, saying, 'Hey! Listen to my music!,' with pictures of yourself in the magazines, then people are going to judge you. 'I hate her music. I hate her hair. I hate her production. I hate her videos.' Fine: don't care. That's the great thing about art: it's not for everyone.

I don’t think that they would have allowed me to make The Best Years of Our Lives just a few years after I made it [in 1946].

I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American.

Criticism pretty much follows anything anyone ever does. So, anytime anyone ever writes a song, plays a show, or does whatever they do, there's going to be a certain amount of criticism because that's kind of what happens.

I'm deeply stressed as a filmmaker, and I know I'm not alone. The censorship crisis, the moral policing, the politics of it has most of us on edge. I'm scared to use certain words: like, if I use 'Bombay,' will there be a problem?

I believe in limitations. I think the worst art ever made - in my opinion, because it's all so subjective - is where the artist had complete freedom.

When I was playing good, nobody was saying I was playing good. When I was playing bad, I would be the first one on the front of the journal.

I know first-hand what it's like to be judged and to have someone criticise your creativity, your hard work and your art.

Ill writers are usually the sharpest censors.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

The most accomplished literary work would be reduced to nothing by carping criticism, if the author would listen to all critics and allow every one to erase the passage which pleases him the least.

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

The greatest danger for artists is total freedom.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.