Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Turner, Ted

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Cocteau, Jean

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

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

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

Hoffman, Dustin

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

10.

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

Burns, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

Flagg, Fannie

13.

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

14.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

16.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

17.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

18.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

19.

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

Collins, Jackie

20.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

21.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

22.

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

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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

Kundera, Milan

24.

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

Churchill, Charles

25.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

28.

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

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

31.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

32.

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

33.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

34.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

35.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

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.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

38.

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

39.

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

40.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

41.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

42.

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

43.

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

Pollock, Channing

44.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

45.

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

46.

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

Buxton, Charles

47.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

48.

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

49.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

50.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel