Criticism Quotes - Page 2

When I left her office, I felt like she'd gut-punched me, brushed me off, slapped me back and forth, gave me a cool compress to put on my cheeks, cold-cocked me with a stiff uppercut to the jaw, picked me up, brushed me off again, then kicked me in the seat of my pants as she handed me a piece of cake and showed me the door.Being a reporter isn't as easy as it looks.

They lost Olivia at Newport Beach. The panic made Alice hyperventilate. You were meant to be watching her, Nick kept saying. As if that were the point. That Alice had made a mistake. Not that Olivia was missing, but that it was Alice's fault.

Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, it was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless.

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.

We would go out and play these songs and people could interpret them however the hell they wanted.

There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.

Criticism is something you can easily avoid — by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

Without self-discipline, your streams of grace become a flood of disgrace. Never let indiscipline weigh you down for critics to pick mockeries on.

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.

A lot of people who find out about the things I do immediately figure I'm just a pathetic "druggie" with nothing to say that is worth hearing. They talk endless bull shit of "recovery!" They make it sound like some amazing discovery...don't they know I'm far too busy trying to recover me?

CAIR is still trying to promote its strange claim that criticism of its ideology is racist....The ridiculous claims that criticism of Islam is an act of bigotry fail to take into account the fact that former Muslims like Bosch, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Firoozeh Bazrafkan have been some of the sharpest critics of the ideology. Did they also change races?

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.    To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.      The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

How we lavish our money and worship on Shakespeare without in the least knowing why!

Shout praise and whisper criticism.

The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at them, is to be openly critical — this is actually nonsense. Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount of respect. That’s actually a faster way to engage with what they’re getting at than to lob grenades in their direction…If you’re going to hold someone to what they believe, make sure you accurately represent what they believe.

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.

It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.

Critical feedback shared in good faith is inherently a constructive dialogue. A “critique,” a term that is both a noun and a verb, represents the systematical application of critical thought, a disciplined method of analysis, expressing of opinions, and rendering judgments.

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

You are surrounded by ignorance, savagery and fanaticism. You live in a society where everyone thinks he/she knows about everything in the whole universe. If you find yourself among those intellectual idiots, then being good and humble may give rise to doubts in your mind about your own ideas. So, you must first learn to distinguish between real and shallow intellect. Then, as a self- preservation tactic, you need to let your pretence of arrogance grow as big as a Dinosaur, so that the fake intellectuals start to realize their true inferiority in front of you.

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

There is a way of reacting to insult that gives people the impression that you want more. I don't know what it is, but I seem to have mastered it.

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.

You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world--they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this one.

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.

Gossip columnists patrol their mundane arena with the same sort of mysterious merit the advice-givers do. Plainly put, how does anyone become a gossip columnist? I can't simplify it down to a lower scale than that. Are there universities that offer courses in gossip writing? How about plain old Gossip 111? Are there that many literate people who could not write a gossip column? What then, qualifies the chosen few above the rest?

In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.

When you are criticised don't ignore it, but don't get overpowered by it, and certainly there is no need to be defensive about it. Rather, wait for a while and then weigh up its merits and demerits, balance it out and chart out your approaches and actions to improve. That is the right way to handle criticism, as it demonstrate your emotional maturity and will enhance your self confidence.

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.

No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.

Critique by creating.

For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.

You will love and admire the One who is honest and blunt in his views, as long as you're not his subject of viewpoint!

Writers have to be tenacious to the point of being pathological. Rejection and criticism is assured.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

Critics are biased and so are readers. (Indeed a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.

Only dead leaves allow the wind to blow them to and fro.

When they try to judge you,remember, they themselves are judged.When they try to condemn you,remember, they themselves are condemned.When they try to break you,remember, they themselves are broken.When they try to hurt you,remember, they themselves are hurting.

The IGAD-Plus's compromise peace agreement is probably pregnant with a noisy, perhaps thunderous baby.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

For the achiever the battle with critics is a slow war of attrition. Let time do the dirty work for you.

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. ... Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art

Though in single life your joys may not be very many, your sorrows, at least will not be more than you can bear. Marriage may change your circumstances for the better, but in my private opinion, it is far more likely to produce a contrary result

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.

The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

The price of success is to bear the criticism of envy.

Writers shouldn't fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence -- it is the greatest killer of writers. So if you hate a book and want to hurt it -- don't talk about it. And if you hate my books -- please, for God's sake, shout it from the hills!