Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Christopher Hampton

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

Rayburn, Sam

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Williams, Bern

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

10.

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

Moliere

11.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

12.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

13.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

16.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

Bible

21.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

22.

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

23.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

24.

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

Pollock, Channing

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Dale Carnegie

28.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

31.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

32.

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

Collins, Jackie

33.

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

Briton, Crand

34.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

35.

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

36.

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

Epictetus

37.

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.

38.

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

Richard Pryor

39.

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

Byron, Lord

40.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

41.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

42.

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

Hill, Napoleon

43.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

44.

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

Kundera, Milan

45.

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

Conrad, Joseph

46.

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

Cioran, E. M.

47.

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

48.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

49.

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

Elbert Hubbard

50.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest