Criticism Quotes

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.

Alfred North Whitehead

To many people dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.

John Mason Brown

The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.

Samuel Butler

Reprove not a scorner lest he hate thee rebuke a wise man and he will love thee.

Bible

In judging others folks will work overtime for no pay.

Charles Edwin Carruthers

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

Kenneth Tynan

If you are willing to take the punishment you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial the battle ugly is another point.

Lillian Hellman

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

Channing Pollock

Vilify! Vilify! Some of it will always stick.

Pierre Beaumarchais

Always bring money along with your complaints.

Plautus

Nature fits all her children with something to do He who would write and can't write can surely review.

James Russell Lowell

Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

To escape criticism - do nothing say nothing be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

Any fool can criticize and many of them do.

Archbishop C. Garbett

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done they've seen it done every day but they're unable to do it themselves.

Brendan Behan

I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.

Max Reger

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

Anatole France

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world tho' the cant of hypocrites may be the worst the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.

Laurence Sterne

The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights actors and audiences - a figure dreaded and occasionally comic but never welcome never loved.

Robertson Davies

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

German Proverb

I had rather be hissed for a good verse than applauded for a bad one.

Victor Hugo

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world - though the cant of hypocrites ihay be the worst - the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.

Laurence Sterne

A guest sees more in an hour than the host in a year.

Polish proverb

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

Christopher Hampton

Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.

John O'Hara

Constant indiscriminate approval devalues because it is so predictable.

Kit Reed

Critics are biased and so are readers. (Indeed a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

Whitney Balliett

Don't judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.

American Indian saying

Henry James chews more than he bites off.

Mrs. Henry Adams

I don't want to see the uncut version of anything.

Jean Kerr

It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

George Bernard Shaw

The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.

Geoffrey Hartman

Two and two continue to make four in spite of the whine of the amateur for three or the cry of the critic for five.

James McNeill Whistler

Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.

Mark Twain

He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help.

Abraham Lincoln

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader and would no more read a book alone if they could help it than have a baby alone.

Randall Jarrell

It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.

Frank Kermode

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

His words leap across rivers and mountains but his thoughts are still only six inches long.

E B White

Said the pot to die kettle "Get away blackface."

Miguel de Cervantes

Critics are the men who have failed in literature and art.

Benjamin Disraeli

As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

What a blessed thing it is that nature when she invented manufactured and patented her audiors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

Oliver Wendell Holmes

My friend, stay positive! It is really good to always stay positive. You don’t really give a damn to negative people, circumstances and things! You only learn lessons from them that can help you take precautions to always stay positive for positive footprints!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

Ernest Hemingway

This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment in not adding one single touch of originality.

Felipe Alfau

It shows a mediocre architect at the top of his game [on the Beetham Tower in Manchester]

Owen Hatherley

Anaemia is an illness primarily affecting characters in novels.

Marchel Reich-Ranicki

There are those who see film and take it seriously as an artistic medium, and others who go to have a good time, to simply be entertained. I have to be careful , because it sounds like I am condemning, or criticizing what people are doing. I have nothing against that, in the same way that some people like rock music or to go dancing, and other people like to go to a Beethoven concert. It's just that I'm more interested in the one than the other.

Michael Haneke

Though in single life your joys may not be very many, your sorrows, at least will not be more than you can bear. Marriage may change your circumstances for the better, but in my private opinion, it is far more likely to produce a contrary result

Anne Brontë

How is he made? Oftentimes bitter, sometimes sweet, seldom even wide-awake, architectural criticism of "the modern" wholly lacks inspiration or any qualification because it lacks the appreciation that is love: the flame essential to profound understanding. Only as criticism is the fruit of such experience will it ever be able truly to appraise anything. Else the spirit of true criteria is lacking. That spirit is love and love alone can understand. So art criticism is usually sour and superficial today because it would seem to know all about everything but understand nothing. Usually the public prints afford no more than a kind of irresponsible journalese wholly dependent upon some form of comparison, commercialization or pseudo-personal opinion made public. Critics may have minds of their own, but what chance have they to use them when experience in creating the art they write about is rarely theirs? So whatever they may happen to learn, and you learn from them, is very likely to put over on both of you as it was put over on them. Truth is seldom in the critic; and either good or bad, what comes from him is seldom his. Current criticism is something to take always on suspicion, if taken at all.

Frank Lloyd Wright

If yourhands are tied towardsanyone who's in need ofa helping hand, let yourtangue also be tied

Nathanael Kanyinga

It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.

Leo Tolstoy

Nothing ruins a good thing quite like knowing you share your opinions with mindless little tits.

Yahtzee Croshaw

Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise.

Idries Shah

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...

Roberto Bolaño

Regarding Christians who feel they have a free pass on being criticized; When the blind worship of an invisible being and the doctrine of millennia-old texts written by ignorant men in another country becomes more important than real, present human beings, then the blind worshiper SHOULD be shunned and criticized. It would be unethical to respond otherwise.

Kelli Jae Baeli

Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism

Max Scheler

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Criticism Quotes

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