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

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Little, Lynn M.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

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

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

Steinbeck, John

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

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

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

Mcclung, Nellie

10.

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

Native American Proverb

11.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

12.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

13.

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

Turner, Ted

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Collins, Jackie

17.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

18.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

19.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

20.

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.

21.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

22.

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

23.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

24.

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

25.

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

Steinbeck, John

26.

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

Mizner, Wilson

27.

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

Cocteau, Jean

28.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Conrad, Joseph

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

34.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

35.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

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

Sontag, Susan

38.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

39.

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

40.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

41.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

42.

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

Churchill, Charles

43.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

48.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

49.

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

Franklin P. Jones

50.

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

Pollock, Channing