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

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

Wilde, Oscar

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

10.

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

11.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

Smith, Sydney

13.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

18.

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

19.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

20.

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

Epictetus

21.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Pollock, Channing

23.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

24.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

25.

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

26.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

27.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

28.

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

Williams, Bern

29.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

30.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

31.

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

Johnson, Samuel

32.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

33.

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

Fuller, Margaret

34.

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

Little, Lynn M.

35.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

41.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

42.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

43.

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

James, Clive

44.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

45.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

46.

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

47.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

48.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

49.

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

Churchill, Charles

50.

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