This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play...

You have to laugh, you have to be able to take criticism.

It is not my methodology to engage too much with critics for many reasons:- I honestly believe that my ego is not worthy of my having to defend it. There are far more important things...

Being overly critical of yourself is like having a relentless, inescapable bully who follows you everywhere you go and abuses you.

People quick to criticize others, but won’t shine the light on themselves. You can’t always judge a book by the outside appearance. You have to open it up and read in order to discover how...

Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice.

Context is everything in both narrative and real life, and while the accusation is never that these creators deliberately set out to discriminate against gay and female characters, the unavoidable implication is that they should...

…some people become hypercritical when stressed.Then again, he hadn’t been stressed last week. She giggled, remembering how he’d instructed her on the proper way to fold hand towels. Talk about nitpicky. Perhaps this would be...

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

The truth is it can be a tremendous opportunity. You prove to the organization you can take criticism and you’re able to turn it around. That’s a very positive career statement.

Fear cannot capture us, criticism cannot harm us, and pride cannot make us fall.

A critic must be knowledgeable in several fields, practices, and mediums. Brushing off art that they personally don’t understand, is not a critique.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties...

When did most of us stop being poets?

Opinions of the masses kill the ‘extra’ in an ‘extraordinary’ idea.

Be warned: A person content to sit with you and criticize others will speak critically of you out of earshot.

Neither the student nor I would mind in the least fair criticism and correction, but no one will permit himself to suffer criticism and correction from another whose knowledge and understanding of the subject is...

what do you want for nothing?” The buyer does not waive his right to express his opinion.”[Thick Skin and Bad Reviews, Blog post, June 26, 2013]

Feminism’s failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of...

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And...

Mega biblion, mega kakon (Big book, big evil)

I don’t want to make people mad. I just… well, how can people get better if you don’t tell them what you honestly think?

I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.

And if I am further pressed to declare straightforwardly whether I mean to disparage these authorities [who criticize Ibsen], I reply, pointedly, that I do. I affirm that such criticisms are written by men who...

The hard part about one being tough yet meek is the illusion of being a punching bag.

Don’t deceive yourself; laughing at someone’s weakness is not the way to reveal your strength. Your strength is in the help you offer, not the mockeries you deliver!

Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck

The man who cannot listen to an argument which opposes his views either has a weak position or is a weak defender of it. No opinion that cannot stand discussion or criticism is worth holding....

Hem,’ he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.

Let them lambaste a million, they won’t bring the crown of victor down on the ground

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Not everybody that says that you suck is a hater. There are people who suck.

Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.

Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is...

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn’t be prepared to make for other people.

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, “If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don’t, you won’t be able to understand your own...

What someone else thinks of you is not what you have to think of yourself.

There is no point of relaying statistics on rape because for every figure given there are thousands missing, unreported. It is a shameful state we have created where a victim chooses to endure the pain...

His conception of the universe is, however, instinctive, not intellectual; it can’t be criticized as a concept, because there’s none there, and it can’t be criticized as temperament, because temperament can’t be criticized.

No-one ever built a statue of a critic.

These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.

Our critics make us strong!Our fears make us bold!Our haters make us wise!Our foes make us active!Our obstacles make us passionate!Our losses make us wealthy!Our disappointments make us appointed!Our unseen treasures give us aknown peace!Whatever...

Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise.

We’re all generous, but with different things, like time, money, talent — criticism.

[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to...

The criticism by China is groundless. What we are doing has nothing to do with changing the status quo.

One Accuracy about criticism is that you don’t ask for it but it’s given to you. How you deal with it? Says a lot about you. People may criticize you for many reasons. You can’t...

The last time we did this there was some criticism on our procedure. It wasn’t the selection. I want to make that very clear. It was the way we handled ourselves on the logistics of...

Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing.