Motivational Quotes

Criticism

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

- Hill, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

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

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

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Costello, Elvis

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

10.

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

Richard Pryor

11.

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

Bible

12.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

13.

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

14.

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

Cioran, E. M.

15.

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

Guinon, Albert

16.

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

17.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

18.

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

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

Churchill, Charles

20.

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

21.

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

Murdoch, Iris

22.

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

23.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

24.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

25.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

26.

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

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

29.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

30.

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

31.

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

32.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

33.

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

34.

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

35.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

36.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

37.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Epictetus

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Cocteau, Jean

43.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

44.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

46.

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

Steinbeck, John

47.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

48.

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

49.

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

50.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond