Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

- James, Henry

Best Quotes about Criticism

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

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

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

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

Smith, Sydney

10.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

11.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

12.

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

13.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

14.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

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

Collins, Jackie

16.

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

17.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

18.

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

19.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

21.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

22.

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

Byron, Lord

23.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

27.

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

Churchill, Charles

28.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

29.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

30.

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

31.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

34.

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

Wilde, Oscar

35.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Hampton, Christopher

39.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

40.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

41.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

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 sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

45.

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

46.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

47.

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

48.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

49.

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

Proverb, Chinese

50.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius