Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

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

Rayburn, Sam

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Elbert Hubbard

13.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

James, Henry

17.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

18.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

19.

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

20.

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

Ziglar, Zig

21.

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

22.

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

Steinbeck, John

23.

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

Porchia, Antonio

24.

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

Hugo, Victor

25.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

26.

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

27.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

28.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

29.

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

Byron, Lord

30.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

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

32.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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

34.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

35.

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

Buxton, Charles

36.

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

37.

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

Briton, Crand

38.

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

Benjamin, Walter

39.

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

40.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

41.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

42.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

47.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

49.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

50.

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.