Motivational Quotes

Criticism

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

- Adams, Scott

Best Quotes about Criticism

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

Honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Jones, Franklin P.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

10.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

11.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

12.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

13.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

14.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

15.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

16.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

17.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

18.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

19.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

20.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

21.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

23.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

24.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

25.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

26.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

27.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

28.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

29.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

30.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

31.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

32.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

33.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

34.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

35.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

36.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

38.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

39.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

40.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

41.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

42.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

43.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

44.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

46.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

47.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

48.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

50.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.