Criticism Quotes

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Thomas Wolfe

I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going

George Bernard Shaw

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-

Ernest Hemingway

Red Carpet: Watching people who actually chase their dreams; criticizing what they're wearing... and wondering why we're depressed.

Steve Maraboli

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

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

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

C.S. Lewis

His forward voice now is to speak well of his friend. His backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract.

William Shakespeare

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Eleanor Roosevelt

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

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

Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds for exemption from the examination by this tribunal, But, if they are exempted, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.

Immanuel Kant

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Wilson Mizner

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

E. M. Cioran

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Helen Rowland

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

Thomas Carlyle

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

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

Claude A. Helvetius

A louse in the locks of literature.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.

C.S. Lewis