Quotes About Criticism

Sarah Palin is living proof that you can't make a silk purse out of a horse's ass.

Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.

A mature Christian recognizes that correcting every wrong on the Internet would take more hours than a full-time job. If you snap every time your great-aunt's friend's cousin thrice-removed makes a snarky comment about "all the contradictions in the Bible," it will consume you and your joy.

I think that much of this criticism fails to take seriously the continuity of themes running through Baldwin's body of work: that he continued to examine questions of American identity and history, railed against the traps of categories that narrowed our frames of reference, insisted that we reject the comfort and illusion of safety that the country's myths offered, and struggled mightily with the delicate balance between his advocacy and his art.

Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

Don't abuse your friends and expect them to consider it criticism.

The liberty of the press is most generally approved when it takes liberties with the other fellow, and leaves us alone.

The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got,Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

The cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.

I might also say, regarding reviews and reviewers, that I have yet to read a review of any of my own books which I could not have written much better myself.

Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely; at least I hope so.

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

However, he initially saw no moral issue with Falkland and dismissed any criticism of the work as faux outrage and contended that he was content to attract readers to his works by any means, including controversy. Leslie George Mitchell states that Bulwer-Lytton, or just Bulwer as he was known at that time, considered his poetry to be his finest work and wished to increase its readership through his novel writing and reputation.

Suffer me that I may speak; and after that I have spoken, mock on.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.