Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

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

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

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

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

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

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

10.

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.

11.

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

James, Clive

12.

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

Costello, Elvis

13.

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.

14.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

16.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

17.

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

Lowell, James Russell

18.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

19.

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

20.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

21.

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

Porchia, Antonio

22.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

23.

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

24.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

25.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

26.

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

Bible

27.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

28.

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

29.

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

Churchill, Charles

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

35.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

36.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

37.

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

Dale Carnegie

38.

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

Elbert Hubbard

39.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

41.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

43.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

44.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

45.

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

46.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

47.

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

Pollock, Channing

48.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

49.

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