Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

- Zeuxis

Best Quotes about Criticism

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Kael, Pauline

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

Benjamin, Walter

10.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

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

12.

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

Byron, Lord

13.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

14.

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

15.

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

Hugo, Victor

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Briton, Crand

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

22.

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

23.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

24.

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

25.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

26.

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

Collins, Jackie

27.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

28.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

29.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

30.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

31.

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

32.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

33.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

34.

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

Guinon, Albert

35.

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

Miller, Henry

36.

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.

37.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

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

Cocteau, Jean

40.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

41.

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