Don’t Fear Criticism, Follow It
If you are building, creating, writing, recording, performing, publishing or otherwise doing anything interesting in public, there will be people on the internet who will say horrible and painful things about it.
But consider consider internet criticism as confirmation that you are doing something interesting enough to talk about. It means you are on the right track. Keep going. Nothing interesting ever got created without someone saying it was horrible.
“The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition.
We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book.”
Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, Oct. 25th, 1851.
“The Central Park, as its name imports, is to be in the very centre of an immense City.
Emerging from such a City into its Central Park, with scenery to remind one of ‘the White Mountains and the Adirondacks,’ will, in our judgement, be singularly unfortunate. The contrast will be sudden and violent — the effect, we apprehend, will be grotesque.”
“THE CENTRAL PARK: Objections of Two of the Commissioners to the Plan Adopted.” published in The New York Times, Jun. 5th, 1858.
“It is impossible to imagine how any man’s fancy could have conceived such a mass of stupid filth, unless he were possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love.”
Rufus W. Griswold, The Criterion, Nov. 10th, 1855.
“We shall see spreading across the whole city like an ink stain, the odious shadow of this odious column of bolted metal.
For you may not doubt that the Eiffel Tower, unwanted even by commercial America, is the deflowering of Paris.”
“Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel” published in Le Temps, Feb. 1887
