Milan Kundera Quotes

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

It is easy to criticize an author, but difficult to appreciate him.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

If you would judge, understand.

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

A critic knows more than the author he criticizes, or just as much, or at least somewhat less.

When a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime.

I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

If we notice a few errors in the work of a proven master, we may and even will often be correct; if we believe, however, that he is completely and utterly mistaken, we are in danger of missing his entire concept.

I know all the critics.

I do wish that reviews were less like book reports. There was an era when reviewers had something to say about a book: when they painted context and drew conclusions. Many reviews these days are little more than plot summary.

The audience is my hardest and best critic.

We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.

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

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.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

The critic's first labor is the task of distinguishing between men, as history and their works display them, and the ideals which one and another have conspired to urge upon his acceptance.

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

Criticism is not construction, it is observation.

A critic is a necessary evil, and criticism is an evil necessity.

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.