Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

- Aikman, Leo

Best Quotes about Criticism

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

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

Conrad, Joseph

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

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

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

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

West, Rebecca

10.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

11.

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

Jean Sibelius

12.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

13.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

14.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

15.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

16.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

17.

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

Steinbeck, John

18.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

19.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

21.

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

Raphael, Frederic

22.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

23.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

24.

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

25.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

27.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

28.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

29.

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

30.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

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

33.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

34.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

36.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

37.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

38.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

39.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

40.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

42.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Mizner, Wilson

44.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

46.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

47.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

48.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

49.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

50.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold