Quotes About Criticism

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

When I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool

My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on ideas. Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the how above the what but do not let it be confused with the so what. Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.

If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.

T]his is how it will remain until ... literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire itself. Only then will you be free to say what you please. [F]or God's sake stop that irrelevant chitchat.

specula?ia filosofic? este inven?ia bog?ta?ilor. Jos cu ea!

A paper of mine entitled The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it.

Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,--needs it for the sake of own white sons and so daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral development.

Where the fuck did you get your medical training? Hogwarts?

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.

I have to sound critical just to let people know there is more to life than they have realized.

you say I'm worthless yet you waste your time on me. you say I can't do anything right but you still waste your breath on me. you tell me I'm stupid yet you still try to teach me. you tell me to live my life yet you give me no life to live?

There were several comparisons with excrement. Unfavorable comparisons.

Why did the best answers to unfounded criticism always come to a person while stewing about the situation afterward?

She's always late, except when we're late, and then she gives us unmitigated shit.

generation. They were the little pigs who built their houses of brick, whereas Gerry's peers tended more to straw and wood. And, oh, how people loved to blow them down. Everybody huffs and puffs, intent on destruction. What do they call it now? Cancel culture.

We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.

At the very least, your idea can change your organization. But it won't go anywhere unless you know how to present it to those in power—and fight for it through the worst of their criticism.

Even young relatives of Magellan found themselves the object of derision and were stoned.

Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.

in most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence." He warned that extremely skilled and productive employees often face criticism, and are fired if they don't start performing worse. Their presence "disrupts and therefore violates the first commandment of hierarchical life: the hierarchy must be preserved.

A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

For every ten jokes - thou hast got an hundred enemies...