Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

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

Pollock, Channing

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

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

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

10.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

11.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

12.

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

13.

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

Benjamin, Walter

14.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

15.

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

16.

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

17.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

19.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

20.

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

Aikman, Leo

21.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

22.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

23.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

24.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

25.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

26.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

27.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

28.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

29.

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

Burns, Robert

30.

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

31.

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

32.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

33.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

34.

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

35.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

36.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

39.

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

Holtz, Lou

40.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

41.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

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

Pope, Alexander

43.

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

Elbert Hubbard

44.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

45.

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

46.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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