Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

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.

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

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

Miller, Henry

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

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Steinbeck, John

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

13.

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.

14.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

15.

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

Bible

16.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

17.

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

Mascotte, John P.

18.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

19.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

20.

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

21.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

22.

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.

23.

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

James, Henry

24.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

25.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

26.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

27.

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

Sontag, Susan

28.

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.

29.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

33.

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

James, Clive

34.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

35.

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

Rostand, Jean

36.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

37.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

38.

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

39.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

43.

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

Collins, Jackie

44.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

45.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

49.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

50.

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