There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

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

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled "wrong."

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

Criticism is the disapproval of people, not for having faults, but having faults different from your own.

Don't mind criticism. If it is untrue, disregard it; if unfair, keep from irritation; if it is ignorant, smile; if it is justified it is not criticism, learn from it.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Remember that nobody will ever get ahead of you as long as he is kicking you in the seat of the pants.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.