Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

- Costello, Elvis

Best Quotes about Criticism

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

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

James, Henry

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

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

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

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

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

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

11.

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

Dale Carnegie

12.

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

Holtz, Lou

13.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Raphael, Frederic

15.

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

16.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

17.

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

18.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

19.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

20.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

21.

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

Elbert Hubbard

22.

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

Miller, Henry

23.

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

24.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

25.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

26.

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

27.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

28.

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

29.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

30.

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

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Ziglar, Zig

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Sontag, Susan

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

39.

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

40.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

41.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

43.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

44.

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

Bible

45.

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.

46.

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

Turner, Ted

47.

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

Cioran, E. M.

48.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

49.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

50.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop