Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

James, Henry

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

Porchia, Antonio

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

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Shenstone, William

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

11.

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

Moliere

12.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

13.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

14.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

15.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

16.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

17.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

18.

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

19.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

20.

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

21.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

22.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

23.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

24.

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

Jean Sibelius

25.

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

26.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

27.

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

28.

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

Burns, Robert

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

33.

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

Turner, Ted

34.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

35.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

36.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

37.

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

Clurman, Harold

38.

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

39.

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

Smith, Sydney

40.

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.

41.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

42.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

44.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

45.

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

46.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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.

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

Cocteau, Jean

49.

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

50.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice