Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Burns, Robert

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

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

Pollock, Channing

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

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

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

Richard Pryor

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

10.

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

11.

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

Updike, John

12.

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

Bible

13.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

14.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

15.

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

16.

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

James, Henry

17.

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

18.

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

19.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

21.

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

22.

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

Rayburn, Sam

23.

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

Harold Rosenberg

24.

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

25.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

26.

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.

27.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

28.

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

Paz, Octavio

29.

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

Kundera, Milan

30.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

31.

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

Williams, Bern

32.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

36.

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

37.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

40.

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

41.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

42.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

43.

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

Benjamin, Walter

44.

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

45.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

46.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

47.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

48.

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

Native American Proverb

49.

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

Kundera, Milan

50.

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