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Criticism Quotes
"It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not."
34
"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."
33
"Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism."
33
"Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on."
33
"There are two kinds of editors, those who correct your copy and those who say it's wonderful."
32
"We gathered all the stock we could find, and made an attempt to move. We left many of our horses and cattle in Wallowa. We lost several hundred in crossing the river."
31
"We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."
30
"But as the Pope has a long arm, which might reach me in France, I have gone a little out of the way to tell him the plain truths contained in these pages."
30
"It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep."
28
"It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds."
26
"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."
25
"Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists."
25
"Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen."
25
"Some people insist that 'mediocre' is better than 'best.' They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none."
24
"They were the sort who berated a man for meddling and chased him away, then berated him again for not being there when he was needed. Not that they would admit he was needed, even then, not them. Raise a hand to help and you were interfering, do nothing and you were an un-trustworthy wastrel."
22
"Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end."
21
"We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be."
21
"Oh, and Mr. Montgomery? I think I counted about four dozen important-sounding words and almost no substance at all in that explanation. I don't think you should close the door on your diplomatic career entirely."
21
"And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. ... But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from."
21
"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick."
21
"Moynihan, when he was ambassador to the United Nations, produced the same effect when he attacked the Third World. These attacks aroused great admiration here; for example, when he denounced Idi Amin of Uganda as a "racist murderer." The question is not whether Idi Amin is a racist murderer. No doubt the appellation is correct. The question is, what does it mean for Moynihan to make this accusation and for others to applaud his honesty and courage in doing so? Who is Moynihan? He served in four administrations, those of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford - that is to say, administrations that were guilty of racist murder on a scale undreamed of by Idi Amin. Imagine that some minor functionary of the Third Reich had correctly accused someone of being a racist murderer."
20
"The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault."
20
"Neither worse then nor better is a thing made by being praised."
19
"Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters."
19
"You're afraid of criticism,' she says. 'But criticism is a sign of life! You know who doesn't get criticized? Nonentities! Only the dead escape criticism."
19
"It is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be."
19
"People have the right to criticize you. You do not have the right to criticize anyone."
18
"Obviously there will be a backlash. If you believe the hype you have to believe a backlash too. Any criticism we get, is always stuff we've already criticised ourselves."
18
"And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?' What is good, PhASdrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
18
"I'm sure that the book is incrediable, phenomenal and so on and so on going in positive direction... But the film wasn't made well (I'm talking about NeedFul Things by Stephen King), the effects weren't good, some scenes were missed, for example I'm very curiouis how does the guy kills his wife with the harmer... The scene reminds me for Shining, but Unfortunately in the Shining there were more possibilities to be saw this scene, than in this film... If some disadvantages will be fixed, then I'm sure that the film will be pretty interesting, however to don't forget about the quality!"
18
"Praise to the undeserving is severe satire."
18
"So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism."
18
"The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists."
17
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