Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Murdoch, Iris

Best Quotes about Criticism

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

Richard Pryor

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

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

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

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Burns, Robert

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

10.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

11.

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

12.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

13.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

14.

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

Briton, Crand

15.

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

16.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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.

19.

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.

20.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

21.

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

22.

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

Bible

23.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

24.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

25.

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

Churchill, Charles

26.

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

Collins, Jackie

27.

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

28.

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

Lowell, James Russell

29.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

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

Pollock, Channing

32.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

33.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

Conrad, Joseph

38.

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

Hampton, Christopher

39.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

40.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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.

42.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

43.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

44.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

45.

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

46.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

47.

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

Kael, Pauline

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius