Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Buxton, Charles

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.

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

Native American Proverb

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

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

Epictetus

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Updike, John

10.

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

Elbert Hubbard

11.

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.

12.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

13.

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

14.

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

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.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

17.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

19.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Miller, Henry

23.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

29.

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

Smith, Sydney

30.

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

Guinon, Albert

31.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Little, Lynn M.

33.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

34.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

35.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

38.

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

39.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

40.

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