Motivational Quotes

Criticism

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Criticism

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

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

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

Native American Proverb

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

West, Rebecca

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

Byron, Lord

11.

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

12.

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

Rayburn, Sam

13.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

14.

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

Hill, Napoleon

15.

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

16.

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

Buxton, Charles

17.

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

18.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Collins, Jackie

21.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

22.

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

Conrad, Joseph

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

27.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

28.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

29.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

30.

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

Pope, Alexander

31.

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

Proverb, Chinese

32.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

33.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Kael, Pauline

37.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

38.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

39.

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

Benjamin, Walter

40.

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

41.

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

Little, Lynn M.

42.

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

Porchia, Antonio

43.

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

44.

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

Paz, Octavio

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

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

Williams, Bern

47.

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

48.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

49.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

50.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De