Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

- Hampton, Christopher

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Elbert Hubbard

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

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

Jones, Franklin P.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

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

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

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

10.

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

11.

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

Kundera, Milan

12.

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

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

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

Conrad, Joseph

16.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

17.

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.

18.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

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

20.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

21.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

22.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

23.

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.

24.

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

Mizner, Wilson

25.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Bible

27.

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.

28.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

29.

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

Murdoch, Iris

30.

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

31.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

32.

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

Sontag, Susan

33.

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

34.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

35.

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

36.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

37.

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

38.

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

Christopher Hampton

39.

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

40.

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

Native American Proverb

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

44.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

45.

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

46.

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

Smith, Sydney

47.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

48.

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

Burns, Robert

49.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

50.

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