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

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

Baudelaire, Charles

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

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

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

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.

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

10.

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

Richard Pryor

11.

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

12.

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

13.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

14.

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

James, Henry

15.

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

Raphael, Frederic

16.

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

17.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

18.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

22.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

23.

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

24.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

25.

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

Steinbeck, John

26.

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

Turner, Ted

27.

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

Conrad, Joseph

28.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

29.

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

30.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

34.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

35.

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.

36.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

Aikman, Leo

38.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

39.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

40.

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

Steinbeck, John

41.

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

Johnson, Samuel

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

48.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

49.

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

50.

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

Burns, Robert