Alexander Pope Quotes

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

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

For critics, as they are birds of prey, have ever a natural inclination to carrion.

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.

Criticism is now become mere hangman's work, and meddles only with the faults of authors ; nay, the critic is disgusted less with their absurdities than excellence ; and you cannot displease him more than in leaving him little room for his malice.

Get your enemy to read your works in order to mend them, for your friend is so much your second self that he will judge too like you.

Criticism even should not be without its charms. When quite devoid of all amenities, it is no longer literary.

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.

No man can be criticised but by a greater than he. Do not, then, read the reviews.

People tend to scare you pointing out your shortfalls. If you voluntarily admit your faults, then people won't have anything to point out.

I'm a very contented, peaceful man. I made mistakes, yes, but I accepted them, and, I hope, graciously.

I'll never be immune to criticism, and that's okay, and I'm very comfortable with that.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

I don't argue with people... if they say I'm not funny, they're right, for them.

I accept that everyone is entitled to his opinion and as a coach, I don't run away from criticism.

Learning to live with the given is the great humbling educational process of life.

Nobody likes to be judged, including me, but I am the first to say that I am far from perfect.

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.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may, by mere labour, be obtained, is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert some judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of critic.

As a matter of fact, we are none of us above criticism; so let us bear with each other's faults.

Critics stopped being relevant when they stopped writing to inform and contextualize, and when they started writing to signal who they are, to display their identity by their stance on what they are writing about. Criticism should never be about the critic, but thats what it has become, and that’s why no one cares about them anymore.

If it is hard to accept a rebuke, even a private one, it is harder still to administer one in loving humility.

A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.

I don't care about people kissing my ass or telling me how great I am. I don't really give a damn. I read the bad stuff a whole lot more than I read the good stuff. I read that because there are always going to be critics who are going to say how good you aren't.

The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.