Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Miller, Henry

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

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

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

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

Smith, Sydney

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

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

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

Paz, Octavio

10.

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

11.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

12.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

13.

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.

14.

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

Collins, Jackie

15.

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

16.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

17.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

18.

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.

19.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

23.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

24.

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

Cocteau, Jean

25.

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

Native American Proverb

26.

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

27.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

28.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

29.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

30.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

31.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

32.

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

Conrad, Joseph

33.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

34.

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

35.

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

Murdoch, Iris

36.

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

37.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

38.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

40.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

41.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

42.

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

43.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

44.

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

45.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

47.

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

Mascotte, John P.

48.

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

49.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

50.

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

Sontag, Susan