quotations about criticism
Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter, Letters to a Young Poet, Apr. 23, 1903
If you cannot patiently bear correction, endeavor to avoid fault.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.
J. P. RICHTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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 of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.
FULTON J. SHEEN
Seven Words of Jesus and Mary
It's commonplace to nitpick on minor faults. But it's exceptional to correct them through enlargement.
BAUVARD
Evergreens Are Prudish
Criticism is the child and handmaid of reflection.
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
Words and Their Uses
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
I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.
ADAM RAPP
interview, Theatre Communications Group
It is time to return to close reading, to a serious and painstaking examination of an author's methods, of his style. Do not be deterred by headaches. First of all, this would be proof of your lack of stamina. And then, migraines, piercing pain and sudden stabs at the temples are more likely the effects of syphilis than of hard work.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
No two characters could, indeed, be found more opposite than the open, eager, buoyant poet, and the dark, threatening, unbelieving critic.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
The modern or metaphysical system of criticism, in short, supposes the question, Why? to be repeated at the end of every decision; and the answer gives birth to interminable arguments and discussion. The former laconic mode was well adapted to guide those who merely wanted to be informed of the character and subject of a work in order to read it: the present is more useful to those whose object is less to read the work than to dispute upon its merits, and go into company clad in the whole defensive and offensive armour of criticism.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
The necessity of reform mustn't be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: "Don't criticize, since you're not capable of carrying out a reform." That's ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, "this, then, is what needs to be done." It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
The Essential Foucault
No work deserves to be criticized that has not much in it that deserves to be applauded.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True; but in assenting to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind. It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the true function of man; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true happiness. But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or art; if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all men; they may have it in well-doing, they may have it in learning, they may have it even in criticizing.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time", Essays
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Of Human Bondage
I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery.
BRENDA UELAND
If You Want to Write
It is easy to criticize an author, but it is difficult to appreciate him.
VAUVENARGUES
attributed, Day's Collacon