Motivational Quotes

Criticism

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Criticism

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

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

Mizner, Wilson

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

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

Guinon, Albert

10.

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

11.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

12.

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

Clurman, Harold

13.

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

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.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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.

18.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

19.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

20.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

21.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

22.

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

Holtz, Lou

23.

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.

24.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

25.

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

Murdoch, Iris

26.

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

Elbert Hubbard

27.

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.

28.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

29.

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

Byron, Lord

30.

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

Ziglar, Zig

31.

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

Pollock, Channing

32.

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

33.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

34.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

35.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

36.

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

37.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

38.

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

39.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

40.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

41.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

42.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Proverb, Chinese

47.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

48.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

49.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.