All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.
~ Ernest Hemingway - [Critics and Criticism]

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
~ Christopher Hampton - [Critics and Criticism]

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.
~ Dr. Emmit Fox - [Critics and Criticism]

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
~ Margaret Fuller - [Critics and Criticism]

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.
~ Ernest Hemingway - [Critics and Criticism]

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.
~ Claude A. HelvTtius - [Critics and Criticism]

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
~ Benjamin Franklin - [Critics and Criticism]

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge''
~ Napoleon Hill - [Critics and Criticism]

In reality, 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 - [Critics and Criticism]

It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.
~ Alfred Whitney Griswold - [Critics and Criticism]

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.
~ Desiderius Erasmus - [Critics and Criticism]

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.
~ Dag Hammarskjold - [Critics and Criticism]

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!
~ Fannie Flagg - [Critics and Criticism]

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!
~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - [Critics and Criticism]

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
~ William Faulkner - [Critics and Criticism]

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.
~ Edward Gibbon - [Critics and Criticism]

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
~ Anatole France - [Critics and Criticism]

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.
~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - [Critics and Criticism]

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.
~ Remy De Gourmont - [Critics and Criticism]

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.
~ Margaret Fuller - [Critics and Criticism]