Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Best Quotes about Criticism

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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.

Algren, Nelson

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

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

Guinon, Albert

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

10.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

11.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

12.

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

Mizner, Wilson

13.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

14.

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

Benjamin, Walter

15.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

16.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

17.

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

18.

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

Murdoch, Iris

19.

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

20.

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

Moliere

21.

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

Cocteau, Jean

22.

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

Smith, Sydney

23.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

28.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

29.

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

Kundera, Milan

30.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

31.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

32.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

36.

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

37.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

38.

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

Briton, Crand

39.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

40.

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

Holtz, Lou

41.

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

Hill, Napoleon

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

44.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

45.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

46.

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

Wilde, Oscar

47.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

48.

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

Sontag, Susan

49.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor