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

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

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

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

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

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

Smith, Sydney

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

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

10.

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

11.

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

Franklin P. Jones

12.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

13.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

14.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

16.

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

James, Henry

17.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

18.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

19.

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

Conrad, Joseph

20.

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.

21.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

22.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

23.

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

24.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

25.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

26.

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

Churchill, Charles

27.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

28.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

29.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

30.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

31.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Updike, John

35.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

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

37.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

41.

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

Pollock, Channing

42.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

43.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

44.

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

45.

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

Guinon, Albert

46.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

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

48.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

49.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

50.

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

Mizner, Wilson