Criticism Quotes

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Harold Rosenberg

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

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.

George Orwell

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

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Ezra Pound

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

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

Charles Edwin Carruthers

There is so much good in the worst of us, And so much bad in the best of us, That it ill behooves any of us, To say anything about the rest of us.

Anon.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Federico Mayor

There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.

Paul Gauguin

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

H. L. Mencken

In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

Edgar Allan Poe

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Milan Kundera

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Milan Kundera

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

Anatole France

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Emmet Fox

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

Charles Churchill

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Frederic Raphael