The learned world has always admitted the usefulness of critical disquisitions, yet he that attempts to show, however modestly, the failure of a celebrated writer, shall surely irritate his admirers, and incur the imputation of envy, captiousness, and malignity.
Critic - Criticism Quotes
People who like this sort of thing will find this is the sort of thing they like.
Like most other professional writers I get a good many letters from my customers. Complaints, naturally, are far more numerous than compliments; it is only indignation that can induce the average man to brave the ardors of pen and ink.
Criticism, though dignified from the earliest ages by the labors of men eminent for knowledge and sagacity, and, since the revival of polite literature, the favorite study of European scholars, has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science. The rules hitherto received are seldom drawn from any settled principle or self-evident postulate, or […]
He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.
I believe that the public likes criticism only in so far as it is a good show, which means only in so far as it is bellicose. The crowd is always with the prosecution. Hence, when I have to praise a writer, I usually do it by attacking his enemies. And when I say the […]
We owe few of the rules of writing to the acuteness of critics, who have generally no other merit than that, having read the works of great authors with attention, they have observed the arrangement of their matter, or the grace of their expression, and then expected honor and reverence for precepts which they never […]
There is no virtue in being uncritical; nor is it a habit to which the young are given. But criticism is only the burying beetle that gets rid of what is dead, and, since the world lives by creative and constructive forces, and not by negation and destruction, it is better to grow up in […]
A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.
Critics ought never to be consulted, but while errors may yet be rectified or insipidity suppressed. But when the book has once been dismissed into the world, and can be no more retouched, I know not whether a very different conduct should not be prescribed, and whether firmness and spirit may not sometimes be of […]
