Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Clurman, Harold

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

Cocteau, Jean

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

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

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

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

10.

Bruyere, Jean De La

11.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

12.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

13.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

14.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

15.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

16.

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

Benjamin, Walter

17.

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

18.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

21.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

22.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

23.

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

24.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

25.

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

Kundera, Milan

26.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

27.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

28.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

29.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

30.

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

Elbert Hubbard

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

34.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

35.

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

Williams, Bern

36.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

37.

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

38.

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

Jean Sibelius

39.

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

Holtz, Lou

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

42.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

43.

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

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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

45.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

46.

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

Steinbeck, John

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Paz, Octavio