Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Collins, Jackie

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

James, Henry

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

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

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Kundera, Milan

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

Nunn, Gregory

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Smith, Sydney

13.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

14.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

15.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

16.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

18.

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

19.

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

Mizner, Wilson

20.

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

21.

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

Proverb, Chinese

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

28.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

29.

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

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

32.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

33.

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

34.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

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.

36.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

37.

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

Native American Proverb

38.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

42.

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

Cocteau, Jean

43.

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.

44.

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

Moliere

45.

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

46.

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

Christopher Hampton

47.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

48.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

49.

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

Burns, Robert

50.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose