Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Hampton, Christopher

Best Quotes about Criticism

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

Dale Carnegie

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

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

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

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

12.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

13.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

14.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Cocteau, Jean

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

21.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

22.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

23.

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

24.

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

Johnson, Samuel

25.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

26.

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

Churchill, Charles

27.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

28.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

29.

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

Collins, Jackie

30.

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

Pollock, Channing

31.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

32.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

33.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

34.

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

35.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Updike, John

38.

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

Flagg, Fannie

39.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

40.

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.

41.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

42.

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

Williams, Bern

43.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

44.

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

Murdoch, Iris

45.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

46.

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

47.

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

48.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

49.

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

50.

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