Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Porchia, Antonio

Best Quotes about Criticism

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

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

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

Wilde, Oscar

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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

West, Rebecca

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Byron, Lord

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

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

Mascotte, John P.

15.

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

Churchill, Charles

16.

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.

17.

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

Collins, Jackie

18.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

19.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

20.

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

21.

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

Briton, Crand

22.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

23.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

24.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

25.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

26.

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

27.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

28.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

29.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

32.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

33.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

34.

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

Updike, John

35.

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

36.

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

Benjamin, Walter

37.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

38.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

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

40.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

41.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

42.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

43.

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

44.

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

Pollock, Channing

45.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

46.

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

47.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

48.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

49.

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

Fuller, Margaret

50.

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