Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Smith, Sydney

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

Churchill, Charles

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

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

Little, Lynn M.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

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

10.

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

11.

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

James, Henry

12.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

13.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

14.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

15.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

16.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

17.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

18.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

19.

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

Aikman, Leo

20.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

21.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

22.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

23.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

24.

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

Williams, Bern

25.

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

Flagg, Fannie

26.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

27.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

28.

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

29.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

30.

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

31.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

32.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

33.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

34.

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

Buxton, Charles

35.

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

36.

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

37.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

38.

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

Moliere

39.

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

40.

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

41.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

42.

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

Hampton, Christopher

43.

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

Mizner, Wilson

44.

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

45.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

46.

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

47.

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

Kundera, Milan

48.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

49.

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

50.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.