There's a fine line between participation and mockery.
Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.
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.
Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.
The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.
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.
Criticism should be a casual conversation.
I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.
To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.
— Bible
The covers of this book are too far apart.
A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.
Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.
Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.
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.
The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.
Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.
A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.
Critics are already made.
No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.
If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.
In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.
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.
They condemn what they do not understand.
He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
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.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.
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.
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
I have found it advisable not to give too much heed to what people say when I am trying to accomplish something of consequence. Invariably they proclaim it can't be done. I deem that the very best time to make the effort.
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.
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.
It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.
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.
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.
It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.
Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.
Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.
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.
We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.
Blame is safer than praise.
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.
Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.
Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
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.
Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!
Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.
The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.
Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.
The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.
Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!
Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.
The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.
It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.
Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.
God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.
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.
If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge
A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.
Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.
If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.
To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.
Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.
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.
If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.
As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.
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.
Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!
Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.
Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.
Honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.
Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds for exemption from the examination by this tribunal, But, if they are exempted, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.
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.
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.
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
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.
If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.
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.
The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
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.
The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.
A sneer is the weapon of the weak.
Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.
People who ask for your criticism want only praise.
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.
Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.
Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!
You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.
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.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.
Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.
A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.
One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.
— Moliere
Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.
We are suffering from too much sarcasm.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.
When the critics come around it's always too late.
All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.
No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.
In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.
Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.
They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.
Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.
Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.
Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.
The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.
Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.
One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.
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]
Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.
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.
A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
In my wide association in life, meeting with many and great men in various parts of the world, I have yet to find the man, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism.
As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.
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.
Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.
For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!
The dread of criticism is the death of genius.
Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.
When subjected to the rain of criticism, let’s not curse the rain. Let’s accept it as a part of life. Let’s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.
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?
I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.
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.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
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.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!
What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.
Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.
A louse in the locks of literature.
No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.
I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.
The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.
A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.
Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.
He who throws dirt always loses ground.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
There is one way to handle the ignorant and malicious critic. Ignore him.
Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat
It is strange that we do not temper our resentment of criticism with a thought for our many faults which have escaped us.
It is usually best to be generous with praise, but cautious with criticism.
Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.
The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.
Don't mind criticism. If it is untrue, disregard it; if unfair, keep from irritation; if it is ignorant, smile; if it is justified it is not criticism, learn from it.
All of us could take a lesson from the weather, it pays no attention to criticism.
Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.
Brilliant people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. Small people talk about other people.
Criticism is the disapproval of people, not for having faults, but having faults different from your own.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
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.
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.
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.
The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.
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.
Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.
On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
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.
A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.
It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.
Remember that nobody will ever get ahead of you as long as he is kicking you in the seat of the pants.
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.
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.