Motivational Quotes

Criticism

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Criticism

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

Steinbeck, John

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

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

Murdoch, Iris

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

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

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

Miller, Henry

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

10.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

11.

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

Shenstone, William

12.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

13.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

14.

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

Costello, Elvis

15.

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

Williams, Bern

16.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

17.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

18.

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

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

20.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

21.

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

22.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Elbert Hubbard

26.

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

27.

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

Byron, Lord

28.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

29.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

30.

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

31.

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

Burns, Robert

32.

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

Flagg, Fannie

33.

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

Johnson, Samuel

34.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

35.

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

36.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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

38.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

39.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

40.

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

41.

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

Epictetus

42.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

43.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

44.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

45.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

50.

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

Mizner, Wilson