Critical Assessment Quotes

The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him.

There's a fine line between cultural criticism and bitterness.

We want to put power to the test of adversarial review.

But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.

A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.

I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.

For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn’t written for poets, it’s written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it’s true for oneself.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

When you evaluate people critically, you bring danger upon yourself.

No degree of antiquity can give sanction to a usage bad in itself.

Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.

Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.

Every piece of entertainment is made with the idea that 'This is going to be terrific' and 'This is the best thing I've ever done' and then it hits the public and then the public tells you whether it's good or bad.

Scientific education is by far the best training for all walks of life because it teaches us how to assess situations critically and react accordingly. It gives us an understanding based on reverence for life-enhancing technologies as well as for life itself.

We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal.

I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.

Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

Criticism, though dignified from the earliest ages by the labours of men eminent for knowledge and sagacity, has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science.