Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Kundera, Milan

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

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

Murdoch, Iris

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

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

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

10.

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

Franklin P. Jones

11.

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

Burns, Robert

12.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

13.

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

14.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

15.

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

16.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

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.

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

19.

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

Clurman, Harold

20.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

21.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

22.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

23.

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

Cocteau, Jean

24.

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

Little, Lynn M.

25.

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

Costello, Elvis

26.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

27.

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

Smith, Sydney

28.

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

29.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

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.

32.

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

Hampton, Christopher

33.

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

34.

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

Native American Proverb

35.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

36.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

38.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

42.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

43.

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

44.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

45.

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

Updike, John

46.

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

Kundera, Milan

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Briton, Crand