On Critics
They who are to be judges must also be performers.
Aristotle
There be some men are born only to suck out the poison of books.
Ben Jonson
Critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.
Sir Francis Bacon
A true critic hath one quality in common with a harlot, never to change his title or his nature.
Jonathan Swift
The world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.
Henry Fielding
I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices one so.
Sydney Smith
As soon
Seek roses in December--ice in June;
Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff;
Believe a woman or an epitaph,
Or any other thing that's false, before
You trust in critics.
Lord Byron
Critics! Appalled I ventured on the name.
Those cutthroat bandits in the paths of fame.
Robert Burns
For critics I care the five hundred thousandth part of the tythe of a half-farthing.
Charles Lamb
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
Gustave Flaubert
The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.
Mark Twain
Nature fits all her children with something to do.
He who would write
and can't write, can surely review.
James Russell Lowell
A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to fine them.
Richard Le Gallienne
A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
George Bernard Shaw
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books involves constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.
George Orwell
One battle doesn't make a campaign, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.
Ernest Hemingway
Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck