Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

- Pope, Alexander

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

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

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

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

Hill, Napoleon

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

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

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

Elbert Hubbard

10.

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

Rostand, Jean

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.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

13.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

14.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

15.

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

16.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

17.

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

18.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

19.

In reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Fielding, Henry

20.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

21.

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

Proverb, Chinese

22.

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

23.

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

Byron, Lord

24.

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

25.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

26.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

27.

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

Dale Carnegie

28.

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.

29.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

30.

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

31.

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

Ziglar, Zig

32.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

James, Henry

36.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

37.

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

38.

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

Steinbeck, John

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

42.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

43.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

44.

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

45.

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

Holtz, Lou

46.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

47.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

48.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

49.

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

Conrad, Joseph

50.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen