Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Criticism.
A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.
Denzel Washington
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.
C.S. Lewis
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.
Leo Aikman
Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.
Chinese Proverb
Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.
Critics, like the rest of mankind, are very frequently misled by interest
Samuel Johnson
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.
William Congreve
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith, "London
Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!
Fannie Flagg
Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.(Gore Vidal writing about the critic Edmund Wilson)
Gore Vidal, New York Review of B
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.
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno
Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.
Joseph Addison
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Susan Sontag
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.
Jean Rostand
All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.
Ted Turner
When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.
Shall Sinha
