Critics Quotes

“When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn't.”
― Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

“Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”
― kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

“I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Often people that criticise your life are usually the same people that don't know the price you paid to get where you are today. True friends see the full picture of your soul.”
― Shannon Alder

“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.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“When dealing with critics always remember this: Critics judge things based on what is outside of their content of understanding.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“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

“Our critics make us strong!
Our fears make us bold!
Our haters make us wise!
Our foes make us active!
Our obstacles make us passionate!
Our losses make us wealthy!
Our disappointments make us appointed!
Our unseen treasures give us a
known peace!

Whatever is designed against us will work for us!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf and the Critics

“You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything”
― Gustave Flaubert, November

“I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.”
― David Farland

“I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.”
― Leonard Bernstein

“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs."

[Time Magazine, October 31, 1977]”
― John Osborne

“Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology

“The chronic kicker, even the most violent critic, will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener— a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of his system.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

“The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“My objective is to create my own world and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images which they are. We have forgotten how to relate emotionally to art: we treat it like editors, searching in it for that which the artist has supposedly hidden. It is actually much simpler than that, otherwise art would have no meaning. You have to be a child—incidentally children understand my pictures very well, and I haven’t met a serious critic who could stand knee-high to those children. We think that art demands special knowledge; we demand some higher meaning from an author, but the work must act directly on our hearts or it has no meaning at all.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.”
― Jonathan Swift

“We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Whatever is produced in haste goes hastily to waste.”
― Saadi

“Beware of those who criticize you when you deserve some praise for an achievement, for it is they who secretly desire to be worshiped.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Hell, I suppose if you stick around long enough they have to say something nice about you.”
― Ava Gardner, Ava: My Story

“Hypocrisy versus authenticity among men is not always so black and white, and as is righteousness, humility is often self-proclaimed. The Church is most definitely supposed to be a hospital for the spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically sick, hurting, and broken individual, yet ironically, many of its critics are those who ran away and permanently denounced its members after they visited and felt that they were sneezed on.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The greatest mistake we make is teaching our children to memorize things without even understanding,
Instead of teaching them problem solving and critical thinking.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.”
― Jeffrey Robinson

“The Scholars
"Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Should their Catullus walk that way?”
― W.B. Yeats, The Wild Swans At Coole