"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
— Winston S. Churchill

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

"The covers of this book are too far apart."
— Ambrose Bierce

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898"
— Mark Twain

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. "
— Susan Sontag

"" You sounded like Dolly parton on helium."
(After kristy lee cook of season 7 on american idol,sang her country rendition of the Beatles'"Eight Days A Week.) "
— Simon Cowell

"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."
— Andy Warhol

"He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help."
— Abraham Lincoln

""It was like orderin a hamburger and getting only the buns"
(After Brooke White of season 7 on american idol sang the song 'Hero'
by Mariah Carey""
— Simon Cowell

"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things."
— Winston S. Churchill

"A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (Beowulf and the Critics)

"It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive."
— Chuck Klosterman

"But instead of spending our lives running towards our dreams, we are often running away from a fear of failure or a fear of criticism."
— Eric Wright

"The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic."
— G.K. Chesterton (The Blue Cross)

"Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

(in Athenaeum, December 1923)
"
— Virginia Woolf

"Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."
— Edith Sitwell

"Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?"
— Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)

"I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
"
— Georgia O'Keeffe

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

"You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything"
— Gustave Flaubert (November)

"When someone offers you lines like that, he must be Mephistopheles and you must be Faust. You know you shouldn't succumb to such language, but you succumb."
— William Logan

"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."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

""I can stand anything but pain, failure and criticism!""
— Mark Cheney

"Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society."
— David McCullough (1776)

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

"Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art"
— David Toop

"It is far easier to be critical than to be correct."
— Benjamin Disraeli

"These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels."
— Henry Adams

"[If] you are ready enough to pull my knitting to pieces, but provide none of your own, the only sock is a sock in the jaw!"
— J.R. Ackerley

"Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so"
— Gertrude Atherton (The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories)

" Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp post how it feels about dogs. "
— Christopher Hampton

"'Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.'"
— Susanna Clarke

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art"
— Susan Sontag

"Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice."
— Edward Dahlberg

"O interesse sensual de Donne por seus próprios pensamentos como objetos [...] levam-no a exprimir-se por conceitos. Um conceito é o extremo limite de um símile ou metáfora que é usada por ela mesma, e não para tornar mais clara uma idéia ou mais definida uma emoção."
— T. S. Eliot

"A rapidez e a concisão do estilo agradam porque apresentam à alma uma turba de idéias simultâneas, ou cuja sucessão é tão rápida que parecem simultâneas, e fazem a alma ondular numa tal abundância de pensamento, imagens ou sensações espirituais, que ela ou não consegue abraçá-las todas de uma vez nem inteiramente a cada uma, ou não tem tempo de permanecer ociosa e desprovida de sensações. A força do estilo poético, que em grande parte se identifica com a rapidez, não nos deleita senão por esses efeitos, e não consiste senão disso. A excitação das idéias simultâneas pode ser provocada tanto por uma idéia isolada, no sentido próprio ou metafórico, quando por sua colocação na frase, ou pela sua elaboração, bem como pela simples supressão de outras palavras ou frases etc."
— Giacomo Leopardi

"Herr Kafka, essen Sie keine Eier." (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with Rudolf Steiner - "Mr. Kafka don't eat eggs."
— Franz Kafka (Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923)

"Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects."
— Paul Valéry (Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci)