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Some people insist that 'mediocre' is better than 'best.' They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none.Robert A. Heinlein
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I started this dirty quote business when I noticed that I only tend to read authors when their quotes convince me of wit and style. In a world overflowing with bad literature and corrupted product-placement critics the only weapon one has is either word of mouth or quotes, and me I highly prefer the latter. So I have just decided that I will only post to facebook through goodreads quotes. That's policy that makes a lot of sense for a writer. .Martijn Benders
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I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.Stephen King
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Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]John Osborne
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Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.Jeffrey Robinson
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Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.Brenda Ueland
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I think there’s a ton of fear in the perception of romance in part because there’s something very realistic in great romance – namely, that women have the right to demand relationships that are based on equality and honesty and trust and, yes, a great sex life.Sarah MacLean
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Genius feels like an over extended Helium balloon about to burst, and everyone criticizes you for not having a conventional way of coping with it.Solange Nicole
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Whatever is produced in haste goes hastily to waste.Saadi
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Is not a critic, " asks Professor Stoll, "... a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution?William K. Wimsatt
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The man is in his work, read it if you want to know about him.R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
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I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.Edmund Wilson
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Respond to critics with humility. Most people are experts in finding problems with whatever others do. That should not be a surprise to you.Israelmore Ayivor
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Don't base your decision on the opinions of those who don't want to see you grow.Yvonne Pierre
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When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn't.Jodi Picoult
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To The Critics Suicide has made more than one mediocre author glorious before he's able to achieve that sobering "second edition" making his a suicide that waits until it's justified. But I've taken more precautions against to Suicide which is to survive in the face of failure. Success is mostly editing, that's what makes things nice. To edit is the other great Power; thus this novel started at age 30, continued at 50 and its 73, has finally achieve supremacy: a person of Good Taste as the third author and as a result the editor of all three. In the end I'll be the author of a letter to the critics a sort of "open letter" but for the living: suicide is not something you can edit out.Unknown
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The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.Oscar Wilde
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A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.Richard Le Gallienne
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On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. – Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. – Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn’t help you. Do it your own way. – Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. – The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won’t write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck.Anne Rice
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The last madness I’ll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.Unknown
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Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.Unknown
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Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.P.g. Wodehouse
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But you don't hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?" she protested." No, no, not for a moment. I merely maintain my right as an individual. I have just been telling you what I think, in order to explain why the elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me. The world's judges of music may all be right. But I am I, and I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind. If I don't like a thing, I don't like it, that's all; and there is no reason under the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of my fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it. I can't follow the fashions in the things I like or dislike. .Jack London
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Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities. .Unknown
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Many critics are born of envy.Wayne Gerard Trotman
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A guest sees more in an hour than the host in a year.Polish Proverb
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Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.Christopher Hampton
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Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.John OHara
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Constant indiscriminate approval devalues because it is so predictable.Kit Reed
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Critics are biased and so are readers. (Indeed a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.Whitney Balliett
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Don't judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.American Indian Saying
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Henry James chews more than he bites off.Mrs. Henry Adams
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I don't want to see the uncut version of anything.Jean Kerr
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It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.George Bernard Shaw
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The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.Geoffrey Hartman
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Two and two continue to make four in spite of the whine of the amateur for three or the cry of the critic for five.James McNeill Whistler
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Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.Mark Twain
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He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help.Abraham Lincoln
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More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader and would no more read a book alone if they could help it than have a baby alone.Randall Jarrell
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It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.Frank Kermode
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Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.Henri Frederic Amiel
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His words leap across rivers and mountains but his thoughts are still only six inches long.E. B. White
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When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.Oscar Wilde
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The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.Alfred North Whitehead
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To many people dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.John Mason Brown
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The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.Samuel Butler
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Reprove not a scorner lest he hate thee rebuke a wise man and he will love thee.Bible
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In judging others folks will work overtime for no pay.Charles Edwin Carruthers
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A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.Kenneth Tynan
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If you are willing to take the punishment you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial the battle ugly is another point.Lillian Hellman
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A critic is a legless man who teaches running.Channing Pollock
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Vilify! Vilify! Some of it will always stick.Pierre Beaumarchais
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Always bring money along with your complaints.Plautus
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Nature fits all her children with something to do He who would write and can't write can surely review.James Russell Lowell
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Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.Oliver Wendell Holmes
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To escape criticism - do nothing say nothing be nothing.Elbert Hubbard
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Any fool can criticize and many of them do.Archbishop C. Garbett
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Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done they've seen it done every day but they're unable to do it themselves.Brendan Behan
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I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.Max Reger
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The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.Anatole France
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Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world tho' the cant of hypocrites may be the worst the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.Laurence Sterne
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The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights actors and audiences - a figure dreaded and occasionally comic but never welcome never loved.Robertson Davies
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A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.Louis Dudek