“Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.”
“You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.”
“A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.”
“If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.”
“Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.”
“Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!”
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
“Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.”
“Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.”
“Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.”
“If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?”
“After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.”
“We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.”
“The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
“Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.”
“It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's ''mature'' critics often are.”
“Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.”
“The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.”
“I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.”
“When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.”
“Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.”
“The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.”
“Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.”
“People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.”
“The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.”
“I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.”
“Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.”
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
“Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled ''wrong.''”
“I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.”