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Criticism Quotes
"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."
27
"The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors."
27
"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."
26
"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."
25
"Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him."
25
"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."
25
"There are two kinds of editors, those who correct your copy and those who say it's wonderful."
24
"We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."
24
"You hear about how many fourth quarter comebacks that a guy has and I think it means a guy screwed up in the first three quarters."
24
"Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.Strong words indeed. But I've always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type . . ."
24
"It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep."
22
"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."
21
"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."
18
"We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be."
18
"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."
17
"Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"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."
16
"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."
15
"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."
15
"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."
14
"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."
14
"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!"
14
"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick."
14
"At first, they'll only dislike what you say, but the more correct you start sounding the more they'll dislike you."
14
"People have the right to criticize you. You do not have the right to criticize anyone."
13
"There is a difference between criticizing people and criticizing a people's uninformed ideals. That is, unless one defines himself or others by their ideals, then he is offended, and usually offended secretly. Because oddly enough, this person is the same person quickest to resort to dismissive name-calling, such as 'bigot' or 'zealot'. And oddly enough, he is always the one, the 'open-minded' one, who adamantly protests for, not only himself, but others not to listen to any type of scholarly theological truth inherently for the sake of his own personal, moral beliefs."
13
"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."
13
"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?"
13
"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."
13
"The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book."
13
"I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so."
13
"Pointing out people's mistakes, having intention to take advantage of people, keeps one bound to a worldly life (sansaar)."
12
"Neither worse then nor better is a thing made by being praised."
12
"If one should criticize one should always have a meaningful explanation to accompany."
12
"Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters."
12
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