Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Christopher Hampton

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Dale Carnegie

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

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

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

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

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

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

Little, Lynn M.

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

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

10.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

11.

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

12.

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

Rostand, Jean

13.

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

14.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

15.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

16.

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

17.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

18.

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

Rayburn, Sam

19.

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

Williams, Bern

20.

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

21.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

22.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

24.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Burns, Robert

28.

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

Cioran, E. M.

29.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

30.

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

31.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

32.

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

Richard Pryor

33.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

34.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

35.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

36.

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.

37.

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

Ziglar, Zig

38.

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

Kundera, Milan

39.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

40.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

41.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

42.

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

43.

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

Shenstone, William

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.

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

Aikman, Leo

46.

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

47.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

49.

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

Kundera, Milan

50.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.