Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

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

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

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

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

Byron, Lord

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

West, Rebecca

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

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

Shenstone, William

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

10.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

11.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

12.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

Johnson, Samuel

17.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

18.

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

19.

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

Kael, Pauline

20.

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

21.

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

Paz, Octavio

22.

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

Little, Lynn M.

23.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

24.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

25.

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

Dale Carnegie

26.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

27.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

34.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

35.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

36.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

40.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

44.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

45.

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

46.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

47.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

48.

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.

49.

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

Guinon, Albert

50.

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