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.

— Louis Aragon

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

— Walter Benjamin

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.

— Thomas Carlyle

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Leslie Fiedler

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.

— Leslie Fiedler

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.

— Northrop Frye

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

— Albert Guinon

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.

— Ernest Hemingway

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.

— Clive James

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.

— D. H. Lawrence

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.

— David Lehman

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

— Paul De Man

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

— W. Somerset Maugham

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.

— Susan Sontag

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.

— Source Unknown

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

— Scott Adams

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

— Joseph Addison

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.

— Theodor W. Adorno

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

— Leo Aikman

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.

— Nelson Algren

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.

— W. H. Auden

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

— W. H. Auden

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.

— Charles Barkley

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.

— Charles Baudelaire

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

— Charles Baudelaire

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

— Jean Baudrillard

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Walter Benjamin

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.

— John Berger

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

— Bible

The covers of this book are too far apart.

— Ambrose Bierce

A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

— Jim Bishop

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

— Crand Briton

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.

— Jean De La Bruyere

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

— Robert Burns

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.

— William S. Burroughs

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

— Charles Buxton

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

— Charles Buxton

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

— Lord Byron

Critics are already made.

— Lord Byron

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

— Thomas Carlyle

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

— Dale Carnegie

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.

— Dale Carnegie

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

— Charles Edwin Carruthers

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.

— Bill Cartwright

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.

— Raymond Chandler

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.

— Raymond Chandler

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.

— Raymond Chandler

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

— Charles Churchill

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.

— Winston Churchill

They condemn what they do not understand.

— Marcus T. Cicero

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

— Marcus T. Cicero

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

— E. M. Cioran

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

— Harold Clurman

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

— Jean Cocteau

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.

— Ethan Coen

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.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

— Jackie Collins

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.

— William Congreve

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.

— Cyril Connolly

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

— Joseph Conrad

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.

— Calvin Coolidge

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

— Elvis Costello

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.

— Edward Dahlberg

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.

— Edward Dahlberg

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.

— Edward Dahlberg

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.

— Leonardo DiCaprio

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

— Benjamin Disraeli

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.

— Henry Van Dyke

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.

— Tryon Edwards

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.

— T. S. Eliot

Blame is safer than praise.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

— Epictetus

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

— Desiderius Erasmus

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.

— William Faulkner

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.

— Henry Fielding

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

— Fannie Flagg

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

— Dr. Emmit Fox

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

— Anatole France

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

— Benjamin Franklin

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.

— Margaret Fuller

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

— Margaret Fuller

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.

— Edward Gibbon

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

— Oliver Goldsmith

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

— Remy De Gourmont

It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.

— Alfred Whitney Griswold

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

— Dag Hammarskjold

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

— Christopher Hampton

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

— Claude A. Helvetius

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.

— Ernest Hemingway

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.

— Ernest Hemingway

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

— Napoleon Hill

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

— Dustin Hoffman