Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

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

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

Hill, Napoleon

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

10.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

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

Smith, Sydney

12.

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

Epictetus

13.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

14.

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

Updike, John

15.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Shenstone, William

19.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

20.

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

21.

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

Aikman, Leo

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

25.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

26.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

27.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

28.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

29.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

30.

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

Flagg, Fannie

31.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

32.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

33.

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

Mizner, Wilson

34.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

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

36.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

38.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Briton, Crand

40.

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

41.

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

42.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

44.

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

Nunn, Gregory

45.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

47.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

48.

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

Rostand, Jean

49.

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

50.

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