“You know who critics are?— the men who have failed in literature and art.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

Source: Books, Coningsby (1844), Lothair (1870), Ch. 35. Compare: "Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics", Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, p. 36. Delivered 1811–1812; "Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic", Percy Bysshe Shelley, Fragments of Adonais.

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Benjamin Disraeli 306

British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Pri… 1804–1881

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