Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

James, Henry

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.

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

Mizner, Wilson

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

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

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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.

13.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

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

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

18.

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

Nunn, Gregory

19.

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

Steinbeck, John

20.

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

Pope, Alexander

21.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

22.

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

Turner, Ted

23.

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

Rayburn, Sam

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.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

26.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

27.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

28.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

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

31.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

32.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

38.

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

Ziglar, Zig

39.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

40.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

41.

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

France, Anatole

42.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

43.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

44.

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

45.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

50.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill