Quotes About Criticism

Each of the arts has its own particular leprosy, its mortal ignominy that eats its face away. Painting has the family group, music the ballad, literature the criticism, and architecture the architect.

All that people have found fault with as exaggerated in fiction you have made me feel.

Au contraire  ! Le public n'est pas si bête que ça. Il n'y a de bête, en fait d'art, que 1 le gouvernement, 2 les directeurs de théâtre, 3 les éditeurs, 4 les rédacteurs en chef des journaux, 5 les critiques autorisés  ; enfin tout ce qui détient le Pouvoir, parce que le Pouvoir est essentiellement stupide. Depuis que la terre tourne, le Bien et le Beau ont été en dehors de lui.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators.

In all ages there arise protests from tender men against the bitterness of criticism, especially social criticism. They are the same men who, when they come down with malaria, patronize a doctor who prescribes, not quinine, but marshmallows.

His condition had plainly improved. Once a slave , he was now only a serf. Once condemned to silence, he was now free to criticize his masters, and even to flout them, and the ordinances of God with them..

H.L. Mencken

Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.

They who lose their Hold do so from their own Want of Strength; but desiring to conceal their Weakness, they attribute the Absence of Success to the first Critick that mentions them.

el encaprichamiento se crece con las críticas.

And to think of today in contrast, with such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table! The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

A few words of criticism and I can bear a grudge for three days at a time, convinced she is plotting against me. None of this has diminished despite years of self-analysis, therapy and "writing as healing", as some of my students used to call the attempt to make at. Nothing has cured me of myself, of the self I cling to. If you asked me, I would probably say that my problems are myself; my life is my dilemmas. I'd better enjoy them, then.

Harry had loved most of the arts long enough to know that artists had to be excused failings which would condemn the general population.

Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.

As Tony Judt wrote a few years ago in The New York Review of Books,8 Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for this she deserves to be remembered.

Concern trolling is when someone appears to be concerned for your health or welfare, but only until they can catch you with your guard down so they can go after you about your weight, size, or whatever they presume is true about your fitness levels and general health.

Every author has some peculiarity in his descriptions or in his style of writing. Those who do not like him, magnify it, shrug up their shoulders, and exclaim __ there he is again!

The press could not help themselves. They attacked like ravenous relatives around a buffet table.

Somebody might get criticized for doing some movie that totally sucks, then turn around and be incredible. Every actor goes through that, not just musicians who act.