Motivational Quotes

Criticism

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Best Quotes about Criticism

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

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.

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

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

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

10.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

11.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

12.

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

13.

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

14.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

16.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

17.

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

18.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

19.

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

20.

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

Byron, Lord

21.

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

22.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

26.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

27.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28.

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

Steinbeck, John

29.

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

Cioran, E. M.

30.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

31.

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

32.

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

Rostand, Jean

33.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

34.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

35.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

36.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

37.

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

Flagg, Fannie

38.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Hubbard, Elbert

39.

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

Aikman, Leo

40.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

41.

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

42.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

43.

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

Kundera, Milan

44.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

45.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

46.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

47.

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

48.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

49.

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

50.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest