Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Criticism

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Flagg, Fannie

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

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

James, Henry

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

Jean Sibelius

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

10.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

11.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

12.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Conrad, Joseph

17.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

20.

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

Williams, Bern

21.

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.

22.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

23.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

24.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

29.

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.

30.

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

Franklin P. Jones

31.

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

32.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

33.

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

34.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

35.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

38.

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

Little, Lynn M.

39.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

40.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

41.

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

Pollock, Channing

42.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

43.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

44.

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

45.

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

Dale Carnegie

46.

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

47.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

48.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.