quotations about criticism
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
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
Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more excellent if good; if meagre, muddy, vapid, and sour, both are fit only to engender colic and wind; but if rich, generous, and sparkling, they communicate a genial glow to the spirits, improve the taste, expand the heart, and are worthy of being introduced at the symposium of the gods.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
If we wear our worst reviews like a backpack, they travel with us.
JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT
The Day I Shot Cupid
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.
KURT VONNEGUT
Palm Sunday
A critic is an old maid that writes instructions to you concerning the rearing of your own children.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough state, or gold in bars; they are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their criticism has scales and weights, but neither crucible nor touchstone.
JOUBERT
attributed, Day's Collacon
It may be laid down as an almost universal rule, that good poets are bad critics.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
Critical, Historical and Miscellaneous Essays
If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.
EDWARD ALBEE
Theater Week, 1988
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
Critics are like dead coals; they may blacken, but cannot burn.
ROBERT ANDERSON
The Works of the British Poets
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
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
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
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
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
Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art. Critical genius means an aptitude for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises which conceal it; for discovering it in spite of the errors of testimony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the loss or alteration of texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter whom nothing deceives for long, and whom no ruse can throw off the trail.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
A perfect work destroys the critic's art.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them.
MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS
The Monk