Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Collins, Jackie

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

Frye, Northrop

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

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

Franklin P. Jones

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

Briton, Crand

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

Gourmont, Remy De

10.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

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

12.

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

Pope, Alexander

13.

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

Richard Pryor

14.

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

15.

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

Williams, Bern

16.

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

17.

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

Nunn, Gregory

18.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

19.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

20.

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

Churchill, Charles

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

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

26.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

27.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

28.

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

Turner, Ted

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

32.

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

Updike, John

33.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

34.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

35.

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

36.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

37.

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

Bible

38.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

39.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

41.

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

Rostand, Jean

42.

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

Pollock, Channing

43.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

44.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

46.

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

James, Clive

47.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

48.

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

49.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

50.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney