Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

- Chandler, Raymond

Best Quotes about Criticism

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.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

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

Christopher Hampton

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

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.

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

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

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

10.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

12.

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

Costello, Elvis

13.

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

Williams, Bern

14.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

15.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

16.

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

17.

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

Kael, Pauline

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Turner, Ted

22.

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

West, Rebecca

23.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

24.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

25.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

40.

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

Benjamin, Walter

41.

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

42.

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

Aikman, Leo

43.

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.

44.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

45.

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

Little, Lynn M.

46.

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

Lowell, James Russell

47.

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

Pope, Alexander

48.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

49.

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

Moliere

50.

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

Cocteau, Jean