Critics Quote by Erica Jong

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

— William Shenstone

“Poets aren't poets because of the way they write, they are poets because of the way they see the world.”

— Brandon Gene Petit

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better…

— Mark Twain

“Poets don’t run out of material the way novelists do because they don’t depend on material in the same way.”

— Julian Barnes

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

— Anne Stevenson

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

— Theophile Gautier

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

— Nathalie Sarraute

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being…

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

— Robert Giroux

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

— John Fowles

“They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets.”

— J.D. Salinger