Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

- Burroughs, William S.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Burns, Robert

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

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

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

Mizner, Wilson

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

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

10.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Little, Lynn M.

14.

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

15.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

16.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

17.

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

Collins, Jackie

18.

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.

19.

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

Moliere

20.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

21.

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

Kundera, Milan

22.

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

Hampton, Christopher

23.

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

Rayburn, Sam

24.

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

Jean Sibelius

25.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

26.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Paz, Octavio

32.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

33.

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

Johnson, Samuel

34.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

Smith, Sydney

36.

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

Clurman, Harold

37.

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

38.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

39.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

France, Anatole

41.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

43.

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

44.

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

West, Rebecca

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

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

Churchill, Charles

47.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.