Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

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

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

11.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

12.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

13.

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

14.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

15.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

16.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

17.

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

18.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Richard Pryor

21.

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.

22.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

23.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

24.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

25.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

26.

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

27.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

28.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

29.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

30.

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

Holtz, Lou

31.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

32.

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

33.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

34.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

35.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

37.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

38.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

39.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

40.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

41.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

42.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

43.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

44.

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

45.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

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

Steinbeck, John

47.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas