Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn’t suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?
Leslie Fiedler quote on Critics
All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn’t read it the way you read history or science.
Leslie Fiedler quote on good Criticism
Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society.
Jimmy Carter – Criticism
No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.
Federico Fellini – Critic
A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying: "Of course I do not like green cheese: I am very fond of brown sherry."
G.K. Chesterton – Contemporary Criticism
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
G.K. Chesterton – Modern Critics
Whether Tennyson was a great poet I shall not discuss. I understand that one has to wait about eight hundred years before discussing that; and my only complaint against the printers of my articles is that they will not wait even for much shorter periods.
G.K. Chesterton – Critics
When such a critic says, for instance, that faith kept the world in darkness until doubt led to enlightenment, he is himself taking things on faith, things that he has never been sufficiently enlightened to doubt. That exceedingly crude simplification of human history is what he has been taught, and he believes it because he has been taught. I do not blame him for that; I merely remark that he is an unconscious example of everything that he reviles.
G.K. Chesterton – Criticism, History
Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.
Samuel Johnson – Criticism, Ignorance
Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.
Samuel Johnson – Criticism
Whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.
Oscar Wilde – Criticism, Vulgarity
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
Oscar Wilde – Critic, Education
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one, behind one’s back, that are absolutely and entirely true.
Oscar Wilde – Criticism
Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.
La Rochefoucauld – Wisdom, Criticism
The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him.
