When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that...

Still the voices of your critics. Listen intently to your own voice, to the person who knows you best. Then answer these questions: Do you think you should move ahead? How will you feel if...

Who do you spend time with? Criticizers or encouragers? Surround yourself with those who believe in you. Your life is too important for anything less.

One of the bigger mistakes of our time, I suppose, was preaching the demonization of all judgment without teaching how to judge righteously. We now live in an age where, apart from the inability to...

If everybody likes you, you are doing it wrong.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful...

Relax and breathe. The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn. Bad criticism is not...

One does not have the right to criticize until he can do the same work without being criticized

Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

We shall, as we ripen in grace, have greater sweetness towards our fellow Christians. Bitter-spirited Christians may know a great deal, but they are immature. Those who are quick to censure may be very acute...

The best people are always the worst. They drive everyone mad by being so good at second-guessing everything bad.

Intelligent people, as some say, in their openness, are indeed slow to criticize, but conversely, in their openness to the concerns of others, the genuine are slow to fret about being criticized.

It’s inimical to be critical without being constructive

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

In one’s relationship with dogs and with a newsroom, a generous amount of praise and encouragement goes much better than criticism.

The aim of language…is to communicate…to impart to others the results one has obtained…As I talk, I reveal the situation…I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

I’m not interested in the reviews by critics over the age of 15.

It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man’s oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it’s place is a work extremely troublesome.

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time...

Whenever a journalist wrote an article about him that was critical in nature… he would invite them to a meal and at first they assumed they were in trouble for being critical of him. But...

As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one...

relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book...

A novel is a tricky thing to map.

Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed. Up there came a flower, The people said, a weed.

Until you stop blaming and become positively self-critical you are not going to move forward.

I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticized me, I have already criticized myself. But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don’t want...

The price of success is to bear the criticism of envy.

My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.

The dreams you have that may meet mockeries from the lips of negative people will yield the success that will squeeze tears from their eyes later! Dare to resist every negative criticism and persist to...

Don’t criticize what you don’t understand, son. You never walked in that man’s shoes.

Nobody kicks a dead dog

Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be: if you were afraid your plane would crash...

A critic can call any poem ‘doggerel.’ That is no more than a slur. ‘Doggerel’ or ‘maudlin’ or ‘sappy’ or ‘sentimental’ is in the ear of the listener. By the by, ‘sentimental’ is okay as...

You can critique her writing, but not her lifestyle.

To call you my critic is to call you my friend.

The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of...

Constructive criticism is about finding something good and positive to soften the blow to the real critique of what really went on.

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Those who criticize our generation forget who raised it.

When you are criticised don’t ignore it, but don’t get overpowered by it, and certainly there is no need to be defensive about it. Rather, wait for a while and then weigh up its merits...

In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.

Some criticism, no doubt, is constructive, but too much is a subtle poison.

A lot of people who find out about the things I do immediately figure I’m just a pathetic “druggie” with nothing to say that is worth hearing. They talk endless bull shit of “recovery!” They...

Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do. One could say that a man can “inject” an idea into...

If only it were as easy to do the work of othersas it is to criticize their performance.

Envy is a sign of insecurity, yes; but so is longing to be envied.

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary...

In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

sometimes in your works, give people the opportunity to express their ignorance; then you prove the wrong with your works.