Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Murdoch, Iris

Best Quotes about Criticism

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

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

Hoffman, Dustin

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

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

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

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Turner, Ted

10.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

11.

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.

12.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

13.

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

Dale Carnegie

14.

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

Franklin P. Jones

15.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

16.

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

Costello, Elvis

17.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

18.

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

Steinbeck, John

19.

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

Benjamin, Walter

20.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

21.

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

22.

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

Elbert Hubbard

23.

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

Hugo, Victor

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Cocteau, Jean

28.

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

Paz, Octavio

29.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

30.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

31.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

32.

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

33.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

34.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

35.

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

Sontag, Susan

36.

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

37.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

38.

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

Steinbeck, John

39.

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

Holtz, Lou

40.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

41.

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

West, Rebecca

42.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

43.

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

44.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

45.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

46.

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

Updike, John

47.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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