Literary-criticism Quotes

Nature to all things fixed the limits fitAnd wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.As on the land...

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This str...

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went...

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexl...

I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to ap...

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by...

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coff...

Literature is news which stays news.

I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is ri...

Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say p...

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We fee...

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet...

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by sca...

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about ...

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they susp...

...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and Am...

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slip...

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same per...

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating t...

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. W...

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be sile...

A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, o...

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited p...

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good b...

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; f...

The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Good...

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old...