Quotations and Poems

» “There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.”
– Zig Ziglar

» “It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
– Virginia Woolf

» “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

» “Remember that nobody will ever get ahead of you as long as he is kicking you in the seat of the pants.”
– Walter Winchell

» “It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.”
– Woodrow T. Wilson

» “A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn’t.”
– Bern Williams

» “Every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is under water.”
– Thornton Wilder

» “The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic — a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “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.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you’re perfectly safe.”
– James Mcneill Whistler

» “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

» “Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.”
– Rebecca West

» “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

» “It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ”mature” critics often are.”
– Alice Walker

» “Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
– John Updike

» “Brilliant people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. Small people talk about other people.”
– Source Unknown

» “Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.”
– Source Unknown

» “Criticism is the disapproval of people, not for having faults, but having faults different from your own.”
– Source Unknown

» “Don’t mind criticism. If it is untrue, disregard it; if unfair, keep from irritation; if it is ignorant, smile; if it is justified it is not criticism, learn from it.”
– Source Unknown

» “For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.”
– Source Unknown

» “Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat”
– Source Unknown

» “He who throws dirt always loses ground.”
– Source Unknown

» “It is usually best to be generous with praise, but cautious with criticism.”
– Source Unknown

» “Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.”
– Source Unknown

» “The best criticism doesn’t trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.”
– Source Unknown

» “All of us could take a lesson from the weather, it pays no attention to criticism.”
– Source Unknown

» “There is one way to handle the ignorant and malicious critic. Ignore him.”
– Source Unknown

» “It is strange that we do not temper our resentment of criticism with a thought for our many faults which have escaped us.”
– Source Unknown

» “Those who can — do. Those who can’t — criticize.”
– Source Unknown

» “A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.”
– Kenneth Tynan

» “A critic is a man who knows the way, but can’t drive the car.”
– Kenneth Tynan

» “The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.”
– Mark Twain

» “All my life people have said that I wasn’t going to make it.”
– Ted Turner

» “I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.”
– Henry David Thoreau

» “No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don’t knock your friends. Don’t knock your enemies. Don’t knock yourself.”
– Lord Alfred Tennyson

» “A louse in the locks of literature.”
– Lord Alfred Tennyson

» “Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.”
– Publius Cornelius Tacitus

» “What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.”
– Arthur Symons

» “Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world — though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst — the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
– Laurence Sterne

» “Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.”
– John Steinbeck

» “Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.”
– John Steinbeck

» “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.”
– Susan Sontag

» “Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.”
– Susan Sontag

» “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

» “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.””
– Raymond Smullyan

» “I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.”
– Sydney Smith

» “If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I’m doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?”
– Christian Slater

» “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

» “Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.”
– William Gilmore Simms

» “The dread of criticism is the death of genius.”
– William Gilmore Simms

» “For if there is anything to one’s praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse — why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!”
– Richard Brinsley Sheridan

» “A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.”
– William Shenstone

» “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.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

» “Give me the critic bred in Nature’s school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling’s honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.”
– Sir Martin Archer Shee

» “As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.”
– Hans Selye

» “In my wide association in life, meeting with many and great men in various parts of the world, I have yet to find the man, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism.”
– Charles M. Schwab

» “A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.”
– Friedrich Schlegel

» “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

» “Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.”
– Jean Rostand

» “David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I’m sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]“
– Isabella Rossellini

» “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

» “Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You’ll be criticized anyway.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

» “Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.”
– Sam Rayburn

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

» “Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.”
– German Proverb

» “Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.”
– Chinese Proverb

» “Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend’s forehead.”
– Chinese Proverb

» “Never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.”
– American Indian Proverb

» “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

» “They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.”
– Antonio Porchia

» “Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil’d; if right, I kiss’d the rod.”
– Alexander Pope

» “Each generation produces its squad of ”moderns” with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.”
– Channing Pollock

» “A critic is a legless man who teaches running.”
– Channing Pollock

» “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

» “Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.”
– Octavio Paz

» “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
– Dorothy Parker

» “The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.”
– Camille Paglia

» “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

» “No matter how well you perform there’s always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it’s lousy.”
– Sir Lawrence Olivier

» “All the world’s a stage, and all the clergymen critics.”
– Gregory Nunn

» “When the critics come around it’s always too late.”
– Sir Sidney Nolan

» “We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.”
– Jose Narosky

» “A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.”
– Iris Murdoch

» “We are suffering from too much sarcasm.”
– Marianne Moore

» “Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.”
– Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

» “One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.”
РMoli̬re

» “A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.”
– Wilson Mizner

» “We have been educated to such a fine — or dull — point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it’s all about. We don’t trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It’s the democratic way.”
– Henry Miller

» “Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.”
– Henry Miller

» “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

» “You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.”
– Lord Melbourne

» “Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!”
– Golda Meir

» “It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.”
– Marshall Mcluhan

» “Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.”
– Nellie Mcclung

» “Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.”
– Federico Mayor

» “You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you’re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.”
– W. Somerset Maugham

» “People who ask for your criticism want only praise.”
– W. Somerset Maugham

» “Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.”
– John P. Mascotte

» “A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.”
– James Russell Lowell

» “A sneer is the weapon of the weak.”
– James Russell Lowell

» “Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

» “The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

» “Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

» “The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.”
– Lynn M. Little

» “If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”
– Abraham Lincoln

» “If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.”
– Abraham Lincoln

» “There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.”
– Sinclair Lewis

» “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
– D. H. Lawrence

» “The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.”
– Jean De La Bruyere

» “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

» “One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.”
– Paul Klee

» “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.”
– John Keats

» “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

» “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”
– Pauline Kael

» “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.”
– Joseph Joubert

» “Honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.”
– Franklin P. Jones

» “I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.”
– Samuel Johnson

» “Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.”
– Samuel Johnson

» “Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.”
– Samuel Johnson

» “To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.”
– Henry James

» “Of course you’re always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you’ll condemn them all!”
– Henry James

» “As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.”
– Clive James

» “If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn’t true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.”
– H. A. Ironside

» “Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
– R. H. Hutton

» “In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.”
– R. H. Hutton

» “I’d rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.”
– Victor Hugo

» “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”
– Elbert Hubbard

» “If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn’t make your house look any better.”
– Lou Holtz

» “You’re never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.”
– Lou Holtz

» “Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

» “A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.”
– Dustin Hoffman

» “If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge””
– Napoleon Hill

» “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.”
– Ernest Hemingway

» “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.”
РClaude A. Helv̩tius

» “Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.”
– Christopher Hampton

» “Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.”
– Dag Hammarskjold

» “It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.”
– Alfred Whitney Griswold

» “The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.”
– Remy De Gourmont

» “Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.”
– Oliver Goldsmith

» “Strike the dog dead, it’s but a critic!”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

» “The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

» “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

» “Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.”
– Margaret Fuller

» “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.”
– Margaret Fuller

» “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
– Benjamin Franklin

» “The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.”
– Anatole France

» “Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.”
– Dr. Emmit Fox

» “Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you’re two steps ahead!”
– Fannie Flagg

» “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.”
– Henry Fielding

» “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.”
– William Faulkner

» “Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men’s judgments of one another.”
– Desiderius Erasmus

» “If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.”
– Epictetus

» “Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Blame is safer than praise.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “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.”
– T. S. Eliot

» “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.”
– Tryon Edwards

» “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.”
– Henry Van Dyke

» “It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “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.”
– Leonardo DiCaprio

» “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.”
– Edward Dahlberg

» “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.”
– Edward Dahlberg

» “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.”
– Edward Dahlberg

» “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”
– Elvis Costello

» “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, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.”
– Joseph Conrad

» “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.”
– Cyril Connolly

» “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

» “The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.”
– Jackie Collins

» “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.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

» “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.”
– Ethan Coen

» “What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”
– Jean Cocteau

» “Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.”
– Harold Clurman

» “Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”
– E. M. Cioran

» “They condemn what they do not understand.”
– Marcus T. Cicero

» “He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.”
– Marcus T. Cicero

» “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.”
– Winston Churchill

» “Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.”
– Charles Churchill

» “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.”
– Raymond Chandler

» “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.”
– Raymond Chandler

» “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.”
– Raymond Chandler

» “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.”
– Bill Cartwright

» “In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.”
– Charles Edwin Carruthers

» “Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.”
– Dale Carnegie

» “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.”
– Dale Carnegie

» “No sadder proof can be given of a person’s own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.”
– Thomas Carlyle

» “A man must serve his time to every trade save censure — critics all are ready made.”
– Lord Byron

» “Critics are already made.”
– Lord Byron

» “Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.”
– Charles Buxton

» “The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.”
– Charles Buxton

» “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.”
– William S. Burroughs

» “Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.”
– Robert Burns

» “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.”
РJean De La Bruy̬re

» “Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.”
– Crand Briton

» “A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.”
– Jim Bishop

» “The covers of this book are too far apart.”
– Ambrose Bierce

» “Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.”
– Bible

» “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.”
– John Berger

» “The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.”
– Walter Benjamin

» “We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.”
– Henry Ward Beecher

» “A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.”
– Jean Baudrillard

» “It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
– Charles Baudelaire

» “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.”
– Charles Baudelaire

» “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.”
– Charles Barkley

» “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.”
– W. H. Auden

» “Criticism should be a casual conversation.”
– W. H. Auden

» “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.”
– Nelson Algren

» “Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.”
– Leo Aikman

» “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 W. Adorno

» “Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.”
– Joseph Addison

» “There’s a fine line between participation and mockery.”
– Scott Adams