Motivational Quotes

Criticism

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Miller, Henry

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

10.

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

11.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

12.

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

Benjamin, Walter

13.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

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

15.

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

Hampton, Christopher

16.

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

West, Rebecca

17.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

24.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

25.

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

26.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

27.

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

28.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

29.

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

Little, Lynn M.

30.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

31.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

32.

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

Pollock, Channing

33.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

34.

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

35.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

36.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

37.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

38.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

39.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

40.

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

Costello, Elvis

41.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

42.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

44.

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

Burns, Robert

45.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

46.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

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.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

50.

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