Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

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

Smith, Sydney

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

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

Jones, Franklin P.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

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

Hill, Napoleon

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.

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

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

10.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

11.

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

12.

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

Steinbeck, John

13.

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

Paz, Octavio

14.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

15.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

16.

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

17.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

18.

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

Sontag, Susan

19.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

20.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

21.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

22.

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

23.

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

Native American Proverb

24.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

25.

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

26.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

27.

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

Mascotte, John P.

28.

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

Costello, Elvis

29.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

30.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

31.

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

Porchia, Antonio

32.

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

33.

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

Miller, Henry

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.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

Benjamin, Walter

37.

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

38.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

39.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

40.

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

41.

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

Turner, Ted

42.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

43.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

44.

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

45.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

49.

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

Holtz, Lou

50.

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

Steinbeck, John