Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

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

Pollock, Channing

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

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

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

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Franklin P. Jones

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

10.

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

Kundera, Milan

11.

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

12.

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

13.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

14.

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.

15.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

16.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

17.

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

18.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

19.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

Nunn, Gregory

22.

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

Holtz, Lou

23.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

24.

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

Steinbeck, John

25.

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

Rayburn, Sam

26.

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

27.

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

Fuller, Margaret

28.

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

Shenstone, William

29.

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

Dale Carnegie

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

34.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

35.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

36.

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

37.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

38.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Christopher Hampton

45.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

46.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

47.

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

48.

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

Cioran, E. M.

49.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

50.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott