Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Hoffman, Dustin

Best Quotes about Criticism

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Richard Pryor

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

10.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

11.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

12.

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

13.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

14.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

15.

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

Bible

16.

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

17.

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

Benjamin, Walter

18.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

19.

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

20.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

21.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

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

Cocteau, Jean

24.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

25.

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

26.

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

Briton, Crand

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Elbert Hubbard

30.

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

Burns, Robert

31.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

32.

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

Guinon, Albert

33.

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

34.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

36.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

37.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

38.

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

West, Rebecca

39.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

40.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

41.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Moliere

48.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

49.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.