There's a fine line between participation and mockery.
View quote | Adams, Scott quotes
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Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.
View quote | Addison, Joseph quotes
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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.
View quote | Adorno, Theodor W. quotes
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Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.
View quote | Aikman, Leo quotes
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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.
View quote | Algren, Nelson quotes
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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.
View quote | Auden, W. H. quotes
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Criticism should be a casual conversation.
View quote | Auden, W. H. quotes
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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.
View quote | Barkley, Charles quotes
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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.
View quote | Baudelaire, Charles quotes
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It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
View quote | Baudelaire, Charles quotes
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A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
View quote | Baudrillard, Jean quotes
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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.
View quote | Beecher, Henry Ward quotes
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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.
View quote | Benjamin, Walter quotes
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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.
View quote | Berger, John quotes
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Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.
View quote | Bible quotes
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The covers of this book are too far apart.
View quote | Bierce, Ambrose quotes
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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.
View quote | Bishop, Jim quotes
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Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.
View quote | Briton, Crand quotes
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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.
View quote | Bruyere, Jean De La quotes
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Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.
View quote | Burns, Robert quotes
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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.
View quote | Burroughs, William S. quotes
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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.
View quote | Buxton, Charles quotes
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Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.
View quote | Buxton, Charles quotes
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A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.
View quote | Byron, Lord quotes
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Critics are already made.
View quote | Byron, Lord quotes
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No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
View quote | Carlyle, Thomas quotes
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Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.
View quote | Carnegie, Dale quotes
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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.
View quote | Carnegie, Dale quotes
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In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.
View quote | Carruthers, Charles Edwin quotes
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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.
View quote | Cartwright, Bill quotes
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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.
View quote | Chandler, Raymond quotes
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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.
View quote | Chandler, Raymond quotes
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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.
View quote | Chandler, Raymond quotes
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Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.
View quote | Churchill, Charles quotes
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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.
View quote | Churchill, Winston quotes
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They condemn what they do not understand.
View quote | Cicero, Marcus T. quotes
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He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.
View quote | Cicero, Marcus T. quotes
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
View quote | Cioran, E. M. quotes
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Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.
View quote | Clurman, Harold quotes
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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
View quote | Cocteau, Jean quotes
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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.
View quote | Coen, Ethan quotes
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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.
View quote | Coleridge, Samuel Taylor quotes
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The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.
View quote | Collins, Jackie quotes
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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.
View quote | Congreve, William quotes
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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.
View quote | Connolly, Cyril quotes
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Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
View quote | Conrad, Joseph quotes
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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.
View quote | Coolidge, Calvin quotes
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Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.
View quote | Costello, Elvis quotes
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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.
View quote | Dahlberg, Edward quotes
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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.
View quote | Dahlberg, Edward quotes
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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.
View quote | Dahlberg, Edward quotes
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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.
View quote | DiCaprio, Leonardo quotes
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It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.
View quote | Disraeli, Benjamin quotes
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Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.
View quote | Disraeli, Benjamin quotes
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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.
View quote | Dyke, Henry Van quotes
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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.
View quote | Edwards, Tryon quotes
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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.
View quote | Eliot, T. S. quotes
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Blame is safer than praise.
View quote | Emerson, Ralph Waldo quotes
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Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.
View quote | Emerson, Ralph Waldo quotes
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Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
View quote | Emerson, Ralph Waldo quotes
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If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.
View quote | Epictetus quotes
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Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.
View quote | Erasmus, Desiderius quotes
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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.
View quote | Faulkner, William quotes
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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.
View quote | Fielding, Henry quotes
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Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!
View quote | Flagg, Fannie quotes
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Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.
View quote | Fox, Dr. Emmit quotes
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The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
View quote | France, Anatole quotes
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If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
View quote | Franklin, Benjamin quotes
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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.
View quote | Fuller, Margaret quotes
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Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
View quote | Fuller, Margaret quotes
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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.
View quote | Gibbon, Edward quotes
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The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.
View quote | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von quotes
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Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!
View quote | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von quotes
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Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.
View quote | Goldsmith, Oliver quotes
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The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.
View quote | Gourmont, Remy De quotes
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It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.
View quote | Griswold, Alfred Whitney quotes
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Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.
View quote | Hammarskjold, Dag quotes
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Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
View quote | Hampton, Christopher quotes
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Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.
View quote | Helvetius, Claude A. quotes
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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.
View quote | Hemingway, Ernest quotes
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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.
View quote | Hemingway, Ernest quotes <