Quotes About Critique

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.

Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas.

Judge not,' it has been said, but being a juryman can be a pleasant occupation when one is not weighing up human actions and years in prison, but the books or the wines of the season.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.

Early in the twentieth century, E.E.Cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be.

Thomas More still has some credit with the king. And he has written him a letter, saying," he manages to smile, "that I am Wycliffe, Luther and Zwingli rolled together and tied up in string—one reformer stuffed inside another, as for a feast you might parcel a pheasant inside a chicken inside a goose.

Rosenzweig daringly criticizes Plato's dialogues because in them "the thinker knows his thoughts in advance," and moreover the other is only raising the objections the author thought of himself.

She's there, throwing daggers at a painting of a sunset. 'You didn't like it?' I ask, pointing to the canvas. 'I liked it well enough,' she says. 'Now I like it better.

Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding.... Cut it at any point, it is the same thing ... all fat, without nerve.

Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.

She and Felicity didn't tolerate the overly skinny, the overly sporty, the overly rich or the overly intellectual. They laughed at people with personal trainers and small dogs, people who put overly intellectual or misspelled comments on Facebook, people who used the phrase "I'm in a very good place right now" and people who always got "involved"—people like Cecilia Fitzpatrick. Tess and Felicity sat on the sidelines of life smirking at the players.

Tess and Felicity sat on the sidelines of life smirking at the players.

If anyone uses the words 'marvelous imagery' or 'narrative arc,' slap them for me.

We always sound confident when we're talking about the other person's book.

Judge Douglas and I have made perhaps forty speeches apiece, and we have now for the fifth time met face to face to debate, and up to this day I have not found either Judge Douglas or any friend of his taking hold of the Republican platform or laying his finger upon anything in it that is wrong.

I am tough on people. Most people don't know how hard I judge them because I don't say anything. All I do is cross them off the list. Forever.

It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are a lot of novels published, but the vast majority of them don't represent major contributions to the medium.

There's a lot of judges on TV in America. Apart from Judge Judy, the vast majority of them are terrible.

I've run as a Democrat, but I was not a Democrat. And when I ran as a Republican, I was not a Republican. I was just utilizing the New Hampshire primary as a vehicle to put forward my satirical critique of the system.

I don't think 'Cocktail' was a perfect critical success, but it touched a vein in our culture.

Like all of Moore's work, 'V for Vendetta' is considerably less than the sum of its parts.

I think satire is most effective when you love the thing you're satirizing rather than... have a vendetta against it.

When critics sit in judgment it is hard to tell where justice leaves off and vengeance begins.