Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Benjamin, Walter

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

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

Mizner, Wilson

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

Moliere

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

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

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

10.

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

Mascotte, John P.

11.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

12.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

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.

15.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

16.

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

James, Clive

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

22.

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

23.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

28.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

32.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

34.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

35.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

36.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

40.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

41.

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

Christopher Hampton

42.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

45.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

46.

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

Costello, Elvis

47.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

48.

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

Epictetus

49.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

50.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott