Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Fuller, Margaret

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

10.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

11.

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

12.

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

Briton, Crand

13.

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.

14.

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

Holtz, Lou

15.

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

France, Anatole

16.

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

Moliere

17.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

19.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

20.

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

Little, Lynn M.

21.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

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.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

24.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

25.

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

Miller, Henry

26.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

27.

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

28.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

29.

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

Collins, Jackie

30.

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

31.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

32.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

33.

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

34.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

35.

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

Benjamin, Walter

36.

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

Shenstone, William

37.

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

Raphael, Frederic

38.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

40.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

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

42.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Byron, Lord

50.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken