quotations about criticism
If you are ever called upon to chasten a person, never chasten beyond the balm you have within you to bind up.
BRIGHAM YOUNG
Journal of Discourses
If we wear our worst reviews like a backpack, they travel with us.
JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT
The Day I Shot Cupid
God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
letter to Sherwood Anderson, May 23, 1925
We are naturally displeased with an unknown critic, as the ladies are with a lampooner, because we are bitten in the dark, and know not where to fasten our revenge.
JOHN DRYDEN
Virgil: The Eclogues
The exercise of criticism always destroys, for a time, our sensibility to beauty by leading us to regard the work in relation to certain laws of creation. The eye turns from the charms of nature to fix itself upon the servile dexterity of art.
ALISON
attributed, Day's Collacon
A poet that fails in writing, becomes often a morose critic. The weak and insipid white wine makes at length excellent vinegar.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
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
The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
The Pentameron: Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
The Wit of Sir Winston
Time is the best critic.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.
EDWARD ALBEE
"Edward Albee: An Interview", Edward Albee: Planned Wilderness
A genuine criticism should, as I take it, reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
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
The exercise of criticism always destroys for a time, our sensibility to beauty by leading us to regard the work in relation to certain laws of creation. The eye turns from the charms of nature to fix itself upon the servile desterity of art.
ARCHIBALD ALISON
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
It is ridiculous for any man to criticize on the works of another, who has not distinguished himself by his own performances.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Tatler, Oct. 19, 1710
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of the newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Kavanaugh: A Tale
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.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.
JEAN PAUL RICHTER
Titan
It's commonplace to nitpick on minor faults. But it's exceptional to correct them through enlargement.
BAUVARD
Evergreens Are Prudish