Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Porchia, Antonio

Best Quotes about Criticism

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

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

Churchill, Charles

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Holtz, Lou

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

Richard Pryor

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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

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

10.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

11.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

13.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

14.

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

15.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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

18.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

19.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

21.

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

Turner, Ted

22.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

26.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

27.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

28.

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

29.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

30.

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

31.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

32.

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.

33.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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.

39.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

West, Rebecca

43.

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

44.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

45.

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

Raphael, Frederic

46.

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

Native American Proverb

47.

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

Burns, Robert

48.

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

49.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

50.

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

Steinbeck, John