Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Guinon, Albert

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Smith, Sydney

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

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

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

Native American Proverb

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

10.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Pollock, Channing

12.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

13.

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

14.

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

15.

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

Briton, Crand

16.

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

France, Anatole

17.

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

18.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

19.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

20.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

21.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

22.

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

23.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

24.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

25.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

27.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

28.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

29.

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

30.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

31.

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

Harold Rosenberg

32.

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

33.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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.

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

36.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Benjamin, Walter

40.

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

Cocteau, Jean

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

44.

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

45.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

46.

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

Murdoch, Iris

47.

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

Holtz, Lou

48.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

49.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

50.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney