Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

France, Anatole

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

Smith, Sydney

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

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

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

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

Miller, Henry

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

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.

10.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

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

12.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

13.

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

14.

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

James, Clive

15.

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

16.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

17.

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

18.

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

Kael, Pauline

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Fuller, Margaret

22.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

23.

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

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.

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.

26.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

27.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

28.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

29.

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

Pollock, Channing

30.

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

Burns, Robert

31.

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

Benjamin, Walter

32.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

33.

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

Steinbeck, John

34.

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

Steinbeck, John

35.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

36.

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

37.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

38.

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

39.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

41.

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

Moliere

42.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

43.

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

Clurman, Harold

44.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

45.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

46.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.