Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Raphael, Frederic

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Jean Sibelius

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

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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

Briton, Crand

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

10.

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

11.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

12.

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

Cocteau, Jean

13.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

14.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

15.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

16.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

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

18.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

19.

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

Hugo, Victor

20.

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

21.

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

Buxton, Charles

22.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

23.

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.

24.

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

Rayburn, Sam

25.

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

Christopher Hampton

26.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

28.

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

29.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

30.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

31.

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

32.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

33.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

37.

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

Nunn, Gregory

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

43.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

44.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

45.

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

Collins, Jackie

46.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

47.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

48.

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

Hill, Napoleon

49.

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

50.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia