Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Criticism

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

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

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

Pollock, Channing

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

10.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Burns, Robert

14.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

15.

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

Briton, Crand

16.

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

17.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Harold Rosenberg

22.

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

Costello, Elvis

23.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

24.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

25.

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

26.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Richard Pryor

34.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

35.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

36.

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

37.

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

Fuller, Margaret

38.

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

Clurman, Harold

39.

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.

40.

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

Little, Lynn M.

41.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

42.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

43.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

Collins, Jackie

45.

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

46.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

47.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

48.

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

49.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

50.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo