Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Franklin P. Jones

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

Updike, John

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

James, Clive

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

Rostand, Jean

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

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

Tynan, Kenneth

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

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

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

10.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

11.

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

12.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

13.

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

Epictetus

14.

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

Costello, Elvis

15.

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

James, Henry

16.

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

Steinbeck, John

17.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Buxton, Charles

19.

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

20.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

21.

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

Smith, Sydney

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

28.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

29.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

30.

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

31.

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

Kundera, Milan

32.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

33.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

34.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

35.

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

Nunn, Gregory

36.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

37.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

38.

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

39.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

40.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

41.

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

42.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

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

Pollock, Channing

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Churchill, Charles

48.

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

49.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

50.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella