Quotes About Criticism

It's not easy to filter out all the negative things people say and/or write about you.

Whatever the reviewers feel about 'The Casual Vacancy', it is what I wanted it to be, and you can't say fairer than that as a writer.

I'm fairly competant as a director and actor, but I am Mr. Neurotic as a writer. I just don't have enough confidence in my abilities to take criticism well. I take it personally. Start with 'It's a masterpiece,' and then tell me what you think could be changed.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

Men whose sense of taste is destroyed by sickness, sometimes think honey sour. A diseased eye does not see many things which do exist, and notes many things which do not exist. The same thing frequently takes place with regard to the force of words, when the critic is inferior to the writer.

Writer's block is your self-critic getting in the way, because creativity will just flow otherwise.

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.

A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression.

From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

Only bad writers think they're good.

Writers who take on polarising issues are apt to step on a few toes.

I always thought it would be funny to have the Parents Television Council write an episode of 'Family Guy' and give them full creative control. Then see how good the episode is. That's something we've actually discussed in the writers' room. We haven't proposed it yet, but if somebody from the PTC reads this, it might be worth discussing.

I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world.

Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?

All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.

I think the criticism that I take to heart is from other writers that I respect.

I'm always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

It's like, if you tweet anything about One Direction, you'll get a lot of hate - immediately. They're just searching the words and then writing back to anybody who writes about them.

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

Not everyone who writes about you is going to be a fan of your music.

When a critic or journalist writes, 'It's too complex,' or, 'It's full of plot holes,' they very rarely take the step of identifying what they mean. The reason they do that is to protect themselves, because they don't want to reveal that they may have misunderstood or missed something.