quotations about criticism
Criticism very often consists of measuring the learning and the wisdom of others, either by our own ignorance, or by our little technical and pedantic partialities and prejudices.... A book thus unfairly treated, may be compared to the laurel, of which there is honor in the leaves, but poison in the extract.
HORACE SMITH
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The Tin Trumpet
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
JOHN STEINBECK
Travels with Charley
Criticism is just someone else’s opinion. Even people who are experts in their fields are sometimes wrong. It is up to you to choose whether to believe some of it, none of it, or all of it. What you think is what counts.
RODOLFO COSTA
Advice My Parents Gave Me
A critic is an old maid that writes instructions to you concerning the rearing of your own children.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.
JONATHAN RABAN
attributed, Looking Together: Writers on Art
Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.
JEAN PAUL RICHTER
Titan
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.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
"A Letter from Cuba,", Esquire, Dec. 1934
Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil. The muscles of the horse are as taut as fiddle-strings, and suddenly a horse-fly alights on its croup, buzzing and stinging. The horse's skin quivers, it waves its tail. What is the fly buzzing about? It probably doesn't know, itself. It simply has a restless nature and wants to make itself felt--"I'm alive, too, you know!" it seems to say. "Look, I know how to buzz, there's nothing I can't buzz about!" I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
MAXIM GORKY
Literary Portraits
Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work, rather than its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as the bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
If we wear our worst reviews like a backpack, they travel with us.
JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT
The Day I Shot Cupid
I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Francis Hopkinson, Mar. 13, 1789
What flocks of critics hover here to-day,
As vultures wait on armies for their prey,
All gaping for the carcass of a play!
With croaking notes they bode some dire event,
And follow dying poets by the scent.
JOHN DRYDEN
prologue, All for Love
The critics, or those who, thinking themselves so, decide deliberately and decisively about all public representations, group and divide themselves into different parties, each of whom admires a certain poem or a certain music and damns all others, urged on by a wholly different motive than public interest or justice. The ardour with which they defend their prejudices damages the opposite party as well as their own set. These men discourage poets and musicians by a thousand contradictions, and delay the progress of arts and sciences, by depriving them of the advantages to be obtained by that emulation and freedom which many excellent masters, each in their own way and according to their own genius, might display in the execution of some very fine works.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.
JEAN ROSTAND
"A Biologist's Thoughts,", The Substance of Man
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They see how it should be done every night. But they can't do it themselves.
BRENDAN BEHAN
attributed, As One Mad with Wine and Other Similes
Criticism is now become mere hangman's work, and meddles only with the faults of authors ; nay, the critic is disgusted less with their absurdities than excellence ; and you cannot displease him more than in leaving him little room for his malice.
JOHN DRYDEN
Life of Lucian
Time is the best critic.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
From the writer’s point of view, critics should be ignored, although it’s hard not to do what they suggest. I think it’s unfortunate to have critics for friends. Suppose you write something that stinks, what are they going to say in a review? Say it stinks? So if they’re honest, they do, and if you were friends you’re still friends, but the knowledge of your lousy writing and their articulate admission of it will be always something between the two of you, like the knowledge between a man and his wife of some shady adultery.
WILLIAM STYRON
The Paris Review, spring 1954
Critics are like dead coals; they may blacken, but cannot burn.
ROBERT ANDERSON
The Works of the British Poets
Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society.
JIMMY CARTER
Farewell Address, Jan. 14, 1981