A Quote by Raymond Chandler

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Raymond Chandler

Quote Topics

Bad Critic Critical Evaluation Good Maintaining Measured Necessity Perception Professional Standing Subject Writing

Quote Author

Raymond Chandler
American - Novelist
July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959

Being your own person and standing for what you believe is a critical aspect of a good professional life.

Patrick Pichette

Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas.

George Packer

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

Will Self

There is a lot of catarsis that passes itself off as art or comedy and I'm kind of critical of that. I think that just because you bare your soul or underwear or private moments it doesn't , or necessarily make for entertainment, or good writing, or funny writing.

Mindy Kaling

My focus has always been on the work - that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That's where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.

bell hooks

There's obviously different roads you can go down. And I think if you study it, how teams are built - and I went through this in Minnesota - the draft is critical, free agency is critical, player development is critical and trade opportunities are critical.

Tom Thibodeau

You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

William S. Burroughs

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

Dan Harmon

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

Michel Foucault

That's something you can't get off the wires in New York is people providing intelligent coverage of what your theater company in Podunk is up to. Many of the people who write what we call amateur criticism are professionals in anything other than name and receiving a paycheck. Very often, they know more than the professional critic who might be writing for their local newspaper. So, really, I'm all for it. It's changing the playing field, it's shaking things up, it's going to make the critical environment a healthier environment.

Terry Teachout

Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.

Dana Gioia

I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.

Albert Goldbarth

Intelligence is not discernment and judgment or critical evaluation.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.

James J. Kilpatrick

Anyone who says that writing for children or teens is easier than writing for adults has never tried it, because they are so much more critical than adults. You cannot get anything past them.