Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Best Quotes about Criticism

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

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

Ziglar, Zig

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

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

Burns, Robert

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

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

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Mascotte, John P.

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

Briton, Crand

19.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

20.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

21.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

23.

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

Updike, John

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

28.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

29.

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

Little, Lynn M.

30.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

31.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

32.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

33.

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

34.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

35.

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

Holtz, Lou

36.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Costello, Elvis

40.

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

41.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

42.

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

43.

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

44.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

45.

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

46.

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

Richard Pryor

47.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

48.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

49.

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