Quotes About Criticism

If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presupposes a whole world-laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

The public loves to create a hero....Sometimes I think they do it for the sheer joy of knocking him down from the highest peak. Like a child who builds a house of blocks and then destroys it with one vicious kick.

I'm a lousy writer; a helluva lot of people have got lousy taste.

ALLEGORY IS STILL a contentious aspect of gay writing. To read a work of literature as an expression of heterosexual desire is literary criticism; to read it as an expression of homosexual desire is 'appropriation' or 'prurience'. Associating it with something in one's own love life is either 'conscripting a writer for the cause' (gay) or 'demonstrating its universal relevance' (straight).

It is almost impossible to get a novel printed in an English journal unless it is warranted to contain nothing at all to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly object, on any ground whatever, religious, political, social, moral or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to your average editor must say or hint at nothing at all which is not universally believed and received by everybody, everywhere in this realm of Britain.

But my later experience has taught me two lessons: first, that things are seen plainer after the events have occurred; second, that the most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticised.

Observe your enemies, for they first find your faults.

But if he starts to get you down, just remember: everything he says comes from halfway up his anus.

Windbag Richard Brody at The New Yorker condemns the film as "obscenely regressive" and "ridiculously white." (I find The New Yorker obscenely progressive and ridiculously Jewish, but that's a topic for another day.)

Sometimes they speak words that cut or bruise my soul, telling me I am unlovely and unlovable—a message I am unaccountably ready to believe. They may be the voices of people close to me, the culture around me, the advertising I can't escape, religion, education, or of my own innate pride or insecurities.

Essentially, Goodell is a water boy who makes eight figures.

You can't take it personally when something you have written sucks. Just delete it and write something else.

It is hard to please everyone. It is impossible to tell you all the insults my painting of this year has won me, but I don't care, for when I am no longer controversial I will no longer be important.

The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?

brought [Mexican food] down to their lowest common denominator," wrote Diana Kennedy, with "an overly large platter of mixed messes, smothered with a shrill tomato sauce, sour cream, and grated yellow cheese preceded by a dish of mouth-searing sauce and greasy deep-fried chips.

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

You know, if you're Guy Kawasaki and you create a car that gets 500 miles a gallon with zero emissions, people on the Internet would say: 'I could have done that in half an hour, and it's been done before. What's the big deal? I expected something more from him.' Meanwhile, they didn't do it, right? They're still living at home with their mothers.

Gossip's not amusement, Uncle Zeke.' Arabella was grave. 'It's an essential part of social life.' 'Why?' 'It keeps up the moral values of a community by picking out the deviants and criticising their behaviour.

Vakhív? támaszt nem a helyeslésben, hanem az elutasításban keres.

a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of.

Let the refining and improving of your own life keep you so busy that you have little time to criticize others.