Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

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

Aikman, Leo

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

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

10.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

11.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Little, Lynn M.

15.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

16.

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

17.

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

Hugo, Victor

18.

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

19.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

20.

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

21.

Orwell, George

22.

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

Holtz, Lou

23.

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

West, Rebecca

24.

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

Paz, Octavio

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

28.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

30.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

31.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

32.

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.

33.

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

Rayburn, Sam

34.

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

35.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

36.

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

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

40.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

44.

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

45.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

46.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

47.

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

48.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

49.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

50.

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