Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Holtz, Lou

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

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

Elbert Hubbard

10.

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

Murdoch, Iris

11.

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.

12.

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

Dale Carnegie

13.

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

Smith, Sydney

14.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

15.

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

16.

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

Bible

17.

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

18.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

23.

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

24.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

25.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

26.

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

Collins, Jackie

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Cioran, E. M.

30.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

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

32.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

33.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

34.

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

Turner, Ted

35.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

36.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

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

James, Clive

40.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

41.

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

Conrad, Joseph

42.

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

43.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

44.

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

Burns, Robert

45.

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

Pollock, Channing

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Richard Pryor

50.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord