Motivational Quotes

Criticism

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

- Walker, Alice

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

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

Aikman, Leo

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

Franklin P. Jones

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

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

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

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

Briton, Crand

10.

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

Elbert Hubbard

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

16.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

18.

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

Hill, Napoleon

19.

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

20.

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

Kael, Pauline

21.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

26.

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

Turner, Ted

27.

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

Christopher Hampton

28.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

29.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

30.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

31.

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

Lowell, James Russell

32.

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

Little, Lynn M.

33.

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

34.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

35.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

36.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

37.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

38.

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

39.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

40.

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

Cocteau, Jean

41.

Blame is safer than praise.