Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Best Quotes about Criticism

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Updike, John

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

Holtz, Lou

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Mizner, Wilson

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

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

10.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

Turner, Ted

12.

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

Elbert Hubbard

13.

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

James, Henry

14.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

15.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

16.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

17.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

18.

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

19.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

21.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

22.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

23.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

24.

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

25.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

26.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Smith, Sydney

32.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

33.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

34.

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

Aikman, Leo

35.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

36.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

37.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

38.

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

Raphael, Frederic

39.

In reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Fielding, Henry

40.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

41.

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

42.

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

Steinbeck, John

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

Churchill, Charles

46.

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

Ziglar, Zig

47.

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

48.

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

49.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

50.

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

Burns, Robert