Motivational Quotes

Criticism

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Criticism

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

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

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

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

Kundera, Milan

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

10.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

11.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

12.

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

Flagg, Fannie

13.

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

Nunn, Gregory

14.

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

15.

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

Williams, Bern

16.

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

Bible

17.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

18.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

19.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

20.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

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

22.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

23.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

25.

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

26.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

27.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

28.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

31.

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

Costello, Elvis

32.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

33.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

34.

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

35.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

36.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

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.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

42.

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

Dale Carnegie

43.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

44.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

45.

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

Holtz, Lou

46.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

47.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.