Quotes About Criticism

My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it's not pointless in terms of pleasure.

They didn't want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.

If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours.

My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a 'car crash of of cliché' is itself a cliché.

Professional critics] act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody is living in it rent free, but even so, surely it is, well, you know… time?

Ich kenne den hochmoralischen Ton nur zu gut, den die rotnasigen Alkoholiker unter den Journalisten so gern anschlagen, wenn sie sich über die Fehltritte der Großen auslassen.

Kinkade sketched the occasional nude woman, and was generous about passing the sketches around to the men and cheerful about accepting criticisms and suggestions, which he seldom incorporated, as he had his own vision. He signed them O.McCaucus-Bigg A new soldier was always puzzled by this, given that this wasn't Kinkade's name. O.McCaucus-Bigg? Braggart, are you? Kinkade would roar. Not as big as mine,laddie! A good joke, suitable for thirteen-year-old boys and bored sergeants and subalterns.

She surprised him by agreeing. Yes, I was simply curious, and no, I would never criticize you in front of your followers. Do you have the patience to endure one more question, husband? What is it? When do you suppose you'll leave me behind?

Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being too attached to her family, which was condemned as a bourgeois habit, and had to see less and less of her own mother.

Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.

Cixi's tolerance of attacks on her government-and on herself-as well as her willingness to permit a diversity of viewpoints were rematched by any of her predessors or, arguably, her successors.

My mother could see that as far as my father's relationship with the Party was concerned, she was an outsider. One day, when she ventured some critical comments about the situation and got no response from him, she said bitterly, You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband! My father nodded. He said he knew.

ÄŒím je ?lovÄ›k nedokonalejÅ¡í, tím pÃ…â"¢ísnÄ›jÅ¡ím kritikem má tendence se stát.

Nindak niyare rakhiye aangan kuti chhawaye; Bin sabun pani bina nirmal karat subhaye.

That is all you can think of: what people will say! One goes from one end of the world to the other to hear the same story. Does it matter what people say?

As the Daoists pointed out, we often identify with our ideas so strongly that we feel personally assaulted if these are criticized or corrected.

comments, nasty words, flying criticisms, and awful accusations. We can even use silence as a weapon. When we give someone the cold shoulder, we may hold in our words, but we're spewing out our feelings all the same.

Those on the decline always criticize those on the rise.

Beth grimaced. "He is a pompous ass." "And in dire need of a wealthy wife. Perhaps you should find a twitch to go with your stutter." "I would fall upon the floor in a fit if I thought it might do some good. The man is a menace.

It is naturally a sign of inner liberation when a patient can squarely recognize his difficulties and take them with a grain of humor. But some patients at the beginning of analysis make incessant jokes about themselves, or exaggerate their difficulties in so dramatic a way that they will appear funny, while they are at the same time absurdly sensitive to any criticism. In these instances humor is used to take the sting out of an otherwise unbearable shame.

purely negative approach

If we cannot defend the things of this world and if none of the relationships in which we walk the earth can withstand the criticism which reduces the whole to relativity, we can still love them and we need take the criticism no more seriously than it deserves (pp. 29, 248).

I'm open to everything. When you start to criticize the times you live in, your time is over.

These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly. Fashion is about dreams and illusions, and no one wants to see round women.