Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

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

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

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

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

Richard Pryor

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

Mcclung, Nellie

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

Buxton, Charles

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

Elbert Hubbard

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

11.

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

Moliere

12.

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

13.

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

Bible

14.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

15.

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

Kundera, Milan

16.

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

17.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Franklin P. Jones

18.

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

19.

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

Johnson, Samuel

20.

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

21.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Churchill, Charles

25.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

26.

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

27.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

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.

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

Paz, Octavio

30.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

32.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

33.

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

Conrad, Joseph

34.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

35.

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

36.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

37.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

38.

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

39.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

40.

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

Briton, Crand

41.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

42.

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

Burns, Robert

43.

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

44.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

45.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

46.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

47.

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

James, Clive

48.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

49.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

50.

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