Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about 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

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

Mcclung, Nellie

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Aikman, Leo

12.

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

13.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Conrad, Joseph

15.

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

16.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

17.

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

18.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

19.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

20.

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

21.

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

France, Anatole

22.

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

23.

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

Holtz, Lou

24.

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

25.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Murdoch, Iris

27.

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

28.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

29.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

30.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

31.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

32.

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

33.

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

Proverb, Chinese

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Updike, John

37.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

38.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

39.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

40.

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

41.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

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

Kael, Pauline

43.

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.

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

46.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

47.

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

Hill, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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

Wilde, Oscar