Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Nolan, Sir Sidney

Best Quotes about Criticism

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

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

Wilde, Oscar

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

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

Pollock, Channing

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

Moliere

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

Clurman, Harold

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

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

James, Henry

10.

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

Native American Proverb

11.

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

12.

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

Conrad, Joseph

13.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

14.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

15.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

16.

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

17.

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

Dale Carnegie

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

20.

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

Proverb, Chinese

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

Franklin P. Jones

23.

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

Cocteau, Jean

24.

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

Little, Lynn M.

25.

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

26.

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

James, Clive

27.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

28.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

29.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

30.

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.

31.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

32.

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

33.

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

34.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

35.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

39.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

40.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

41.

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

Steinbeck, John

42.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

43.

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

44.

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

Flagg, Fannie

45.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

46.

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

47.

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

Richard Pryor

48.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

49.

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

50.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry