Quotes about criticism

"I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style."

Aragon, Louis on criticism
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"Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby."

Benjamin, Walter on criticism
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"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 on criticism
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"There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on criticism
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"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 on criticism
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"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 on criticism
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"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 on criticism
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"Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom."

Galbraith, John Kenneth on criticism
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"When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right."

Guinon, Albert on criticism
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"You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple."

Hemingway, Ernest on criticism
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"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 on criticism
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"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. on criticism
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"There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic."

Lehman, David on criticism
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"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements."

Man, Paul De on criticism
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"The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things."

Maugham, W. Somerset on criticism
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"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings."

Sontag, Susan on criticism
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"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."

Unknown, Source on criticism
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"There's a fine line between participation and mockery."

Adams, Scott on criticism
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"Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity."

Addison, Joseph on criticism
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"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. on criticism
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"Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else."

Aikman, Leo on criticism
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"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."

Algren, Nelson on criticism
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"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. on criticism
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"Criticism should be a casual conversation."

Auden, W. H. on criticism
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"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."

Barkley, Charles on criticism
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"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."

Baudelaire, Charles on criticism
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"It is from the womb of art that criticism was born."

Baudelaire, Charles on criticism
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"A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy."

Baudrillard, Jean on criticism
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"We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started."

Beecher, Henry Ward on criticism
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"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 on criticism
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"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."

Berger, John on criticism
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"Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath."

Bible on criticism
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"The covers of this book are too far apart."

Bierce, Ambrose on criticism
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"A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."

Bishop, Jim on criticism
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"Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea."

Briton, Crand on criticism
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"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."

Bruyere, Jean De La on criticism
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"Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame."

Burns, Robert on criticism
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"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."

Burroughs, William S. on criticism
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"The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon."

Buxton, Charles on criticism
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"Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred."

Buxton, Charles on criticism
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