Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Mcclung, Nellie

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

10.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

11.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

12.

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

Briton, Crand

13.

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

Benjamin, Walter

14.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

15.

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

Conrad, Joseph

16.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

17.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

18.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

19.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

20.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

21.

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

Sontag, Susan

22.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

23.

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

France, Anatole

24.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

25.

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

26.

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

Paz, Octavio

27.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

28.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

29.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

30.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

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

Byron, Lord

32.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

36.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

37.

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

Kael, Pauline

38.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

39.

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

Kundera, Milan

40.

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

41.

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

Buxton, Charles

42.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

43.

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

44.

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

Costello, Elvis

45.

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

46.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

47.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean