Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

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

Dale Carnegie

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

Costello, Elvis

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

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

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

10.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

11.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

12.

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.

13.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

15.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

16.

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

Richard Pryor

17.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

21.

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

Briton, Crand

22.

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

23.

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

Hugo, Victor

24.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

25.

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

26.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

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.

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

29.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

32.

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

33.

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

34.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

35.

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

36.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

39.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

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

Fuller, Margaret

41.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

42.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

43.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

44.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

46.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

47.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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