219 quotes about Critics and Criticism
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There's a fine line between participation and mockery.
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Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.
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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.
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Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.
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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.
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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.
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Criticism should be a casual conversation.
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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.
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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.
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It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
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A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.
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The covers of this book are too far apart.
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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.
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Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.
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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.
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Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.
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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.
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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.
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Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.
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A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.
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Critics are already made.
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No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
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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.
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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.
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In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.
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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.
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They condemn what they do not understand.
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He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
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Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.
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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
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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.
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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.
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The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.
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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.
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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.
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Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
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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.
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Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.
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Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Blame is safer than praise.
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Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.
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Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
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If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.
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Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.
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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.
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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.
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Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!
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Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.
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The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!
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Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.
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The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.
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It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.
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Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.
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Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
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Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.
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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.
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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.
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