#critic

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#art #criticism #desire #films #gravity

We are all failures- at least the best of us are. ↗

— J.M. Barrie

#learning #moving-on #self-criticism #success #success

Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work. ↗

— Marilyn Monroe

#critics #doubts #work

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it." (Casual Chance, 1964) ↗

— Colette

#editing #self-criticism #writing #chance

Every great film should seem new every time you see it." Roger Ebert ↗

— Roger Ebert

#films #film

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#state

Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them. ↗

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

#criticism #goya #life #art

What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive... An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men's fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice it until too late; and it is most unlikely that we shall know its causes. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#art

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#democracy #humour #politics #democracy

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#literary-criticism #obscurity #writing #authority