Famous Quotes about Critics and Criticism (219 Quotations)

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Remember that nobody will ever get ahead of you as long as he is kicking you in the seat of the pants.

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.

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.

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

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

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

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.''

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

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic — a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

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.