Criticism Quotes

No-one ever built a statue of a critic.

~ David Nicholls

No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.

~ Samuel Johnson

His forward voice now is to speak well of his friend. His backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract.

~ William Shakespeare

Don't think for a minute that bad publicity and endless criticism don't leave their claw marks on everyone concerned. Your friends try to cheer you up by saying lightly, I suppose you get used to it, and ignore it. You try. You try damned hard. But you never get used to it. It always wounds and hurts.

~ Ava Gardner

Now, if there were an Olympics for misleading, mismanaging and misappropriating then this administration would take the gold, world-records for violations of national and international law. They want another four year term to continue to alienate our allies, spend our children's inheritance and hollow out the economy. We cannot afford another Republican administration.

~ Dennis Kucinich

If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic.

~ Roman Payne

...it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

~ Karl Marx

The public talk -- and injuriously! -- Well! are you ignorant of the little importance of such talk? -- The public speak! -- It is not the world, it is only the despicable part of it -- only the ill-natured, who upon the smallest evidence pass rash judgements, and anticipate events, the wise wait for them and are silent.

~ Joseph Boruwlaski

The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.

~ C.s. Lewis

A novel is a tricky thing to map.

~ Reif Larsen

Introspection precedes constructive criticism.Introspeksi mendahului kritik yang membangun.

~ Toba Beta

If Patti Lupone was born to play Evita then Madonna was born to play Patti Lupone playing Evita.

~ Buck Bannister

To engage with criticism, is on some level, a validation of that which otherwise would go unnoticed.

~ Jordan Carl Curtis

When sonneteering Wordsworth re-creates the landing of Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent -Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore- he unveils nothing less than a canvas by Rubens, baroque master of baroque masters; this is the landing of a TRAGIC Marie de Medicis.Yet so receptive was the English ear to sheep-Wordsworth's perverse 'Enough of Art' that it is not any of these works of supreme art, these master-sonnets of English literature, that are sold as picture postcards, with the text in lieu of the view, in the Lake District! it is those eternally, infernally sprightly Daffodils.

~ Brigid Brophy

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless medio

~ Anton Chekhov

If you find yourself criticizing other people, you're probably doing it out of Resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. if they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.

~ Stephen Pressfield

It is not my methodology to engage too much with critics for many reasons:- I honestly believe that my ego is not worthy of my having to defend it. There are far more important things in the ummah than me having to respond to critics.- By and large, criticism is a part of human life and nature and we have ourselves to accomplish more than just responding to what people say about us.- The best way to silence the speech of the critics it through the deafening noise of your own actions.- Criticising is the job that requires zero qualifications.

~ Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi

To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

~ Steven Heighton

If you find yourself criticizing other people, your probably doing it out of Resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. if they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.

~ Stephen Pressfield

Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.

~ Susanna Clarke

At that shameful stage in the development of our criticism, literary abuse would overstep all limits of decorum; literature itself was a totally extraneous matter in critical articles: they were pure invective, a vulgar battle of vulgar jokes, double-entendres, the most vicious calumnies and offensive constructions. It goes without saying, that in this inglorious battle, the only winners were those who had nothing to lose as far as their good name was concerned. My friends and I were totally deluded. We imagined ourselves engaged in the subtle philosophical disputes of the portico or the academy, or at least the drawing room. In actual fact we were slumming it.

~ Vladimir Odoyevsky

...like the emperor striding confidently along without clothes, convinced by them and their inward monitions that their criticism is effecting changes in society.

~ Samuel F. Pickering Jr.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.

~ George Steiner

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.

~ Martin Baker

Domination and critique have always formed an apparatus covertly against a common hostis: the conspirator, who works under cover, who used everything THEY give him and everything THEY attribute to him as a mask. The conspirator is everywhere hated, although THEY will never hate him as much as he enjoys playing his game. No doubt a certain amount of what one usually calls “perversion” accounts for the pleasure, since what he enjoys, among other things, is his opacity. But that isn’t the reason THEY continue to push the conspirator to make himself a critic, to subjectivate himself as critic, nor the reason for the hate THEY so commonly express. The reason is quite simply the danger he represents. The danger, for Empire, is war machines: that one person, that people transform themselves into war machines, ORGANICALLY JOIN THEIR TASTE FOR LIFE AND THEIR TASTE FOR DESTRUCTION.

~ Tiqqun

[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give points to much wiser men than he.Authors bear this sort of thing with a magnanimity and a patience that are really incomprehensible. For, after all, who are those critics, who with their trenchant tone, their dicta, might be supposed sons of the gods? They are simply fellows who were at college with us, and who have turned their studies to less account, since they have not produced anything, and can do no more than soil and spoil the works of others, like true stymphalid vampires.

~ Théophile Gautier

As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity, charm, and success, and the more lasting moral values. Their creator did make that distinction, however, and so was constantly surrounding his characters with a mist of admiration and then blowing it away.

~ Scott Donaldson

A tightly woven argument is more impermeable to the frigid winds of criticism.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

This book is dedicated to Israel's constructive and nuanced critics, whose rational voices are too often drowned out by the exaggerations, demonizations, and hate-filled lies put forth by Israel's enemies. Criticism is the lifeblood of democracy and a sure sign of admiration for an imperfect democracy seeking to improve itself.

~ Alan Dershowitz

A tightly woven argument is impermeable to the frigid winds of criticism.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

People hate to see their vices depicted, but vice is terrible and it should be depicted.

~ Aubrey Beardsley

On Critique – Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t do or teach, criticize.

~ Marsha Hinds

Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. Critical thinking may be a ubiquitous educational slogan—a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood—but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant.

~ A.o. Scott

For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.

~ Jonathan Swift

...chuck-full of error, masturbation and Jesus.

~ Thorndike Edward L

Most critics, fond of subservient artstill make the whole depend upon a part.They talk of principles, but notions prizeAnd all to one loved folly sacrifice.

~ Alexander Pope

And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others.

~ Ben Lerner

There are braying men in the world as well as braying asses; for what's loud and senseless talking and swearing, any other than braying?

~ Sir Roger L'estrange