Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

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.

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

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.

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

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

Rayburn, Sam

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

10.

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

11.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

13.

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

Richard Pryor

14.

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

15.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

16.

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

Kundera, Milan

17.

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

18.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

19.

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.

20.

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

Kundera, Milan

21.

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

Collins, Jackie

22.

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

James, Henry

23.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

24.

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

Williams, Bern

25.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

26.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

27.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

28.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

29.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

31.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

32.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

35.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

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.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

38.

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

Cocteau, Jean

39.

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

40.

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

France, Anatole

41.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

42.

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

Clurman, Harold

43.

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

Jean Sibelius

44.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

45.

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

46.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

47.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

48.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

49.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.