Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Conrad, Joseph

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

Buxton, Charles

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

Johnson, Samuel

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

10.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

11.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Richard Pryor

15.

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

16.

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

Pollock, Channing

17.

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

18.

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

Kundera, Milan

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Native American Proverb

22.

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

23.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

24.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

25.

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.

26.

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

Pope, Alexander

27.

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

28.

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

Little, Lynn M.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

32.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

34.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

36.

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

Kael, Pauline

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

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

Churchill, Charles

41.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

42.

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

43.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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