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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

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

Pollock, Channing

10.

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.

11.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

Aikman, Leo

13.

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.

14.

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

Kundera, Milan

15.

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

Kael, Pauline

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

18.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

19.

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

Dale Carnegie

20.

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

Mizner, Wilson

21.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

Proverb, Chinese

23.

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

Steinbeck, John

24.

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

Buxton, Charles

25.

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.

26.

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

Native American Proverb

27.

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

28.

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

France, Anatole

29.

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

30.

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

Bible

31.

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

Rostand, Jean

32.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Costello, Elvis

36.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

37.

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

Guinon, Albert

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

41.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

49.

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

Little, Lynn M.

50.

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