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

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

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

Kael, Pauline

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Elbert Hubbard

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

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

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

10.

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

Miller, Henry

11.

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

Buxton, Charles

12.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

13.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

14.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

15.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

16.

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

17.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

19.

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

20.

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

Guinon, Albert

21.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

22.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Briton, Crand

24.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

27.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

28.

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

29.

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

Moliere

30.

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.

31.

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

Rayburn, Sam

32.

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

Kundera, Milan

33.

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

Native American Proverb

34.

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

Smith, Sydney

35.

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

36.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

37.

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

Paz, Octavio

38.

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

39.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

40.

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

41.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

42.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

43.

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

44.

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

Conrad, Joseph

45.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

46.

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

Updike, John

47.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

48.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

49.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo