#criticism

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

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

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#criticism #memory #verbal-abuse #words #ignorance

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’. ↗

— David Mitchell

#writing #criticism

The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment. ↗

— Elbert Hubbard

#being #criticism #endure #final #final proof

People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#criticism