Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Jean Sibelius

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

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

10.

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

Buxton, Charles

11.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

12.

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

Updike, John

13.

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

14.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

15.

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

16.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

21.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

22.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

23.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

24.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

26.

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

27.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

28.

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

Byron, Lord

29.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

30.

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

31.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

32.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

34.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

35.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

37.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

38.

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.

39.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

40.

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

Smith, Sydney

41.

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

42.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

46.

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

Costello, Elvis

47.

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

James, Clive

48.

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

49.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott