Literary Criticism Quotes: top 68 famous quotes about Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Literary Criticism quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
[Time Magazine, October 31, 1977] — John Osborne

A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive. — Ivor A. Richards

Sympathy once more reveals its limits when faced with madness. — Jose Alaniz

The thing people don't realize, God bless them, is that my books are supposed to suck. — Stephenie Meyer

Criticism even should not be without its charms. When quite devoid of all amenities, it is no longer literary. — Joseph Joubert

All writers misspeak, revealing not what they thought they said, but almost what they were afraid to say. — Charles E. Bressler

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses. — Oscar Wilde

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it. — Moses Hadas

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself. — John Steinbeck

I would have died, before a literary agent ever committed to my book. This is why I chose to empower myself by self publishing. — Mary Sage Nguyen

The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics. — C.S. Lewis

In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people. — C.S. Lewis

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic. — Anne Stevenson

What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle. — Claude Calame

Attempts to connect men's circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful. — C.S. Lewis

Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit. — John Fante

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. — Samuel Johnson

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93] — Northrop Frye

Literature has become merely a tool for culture studies. — Anuradha Bhattacharyya

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it. — G.K. Chesterton

Lovecraft dangles like a rabbit from the jaws of his unconscious. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent. — Nelson Algren

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness). — Christopher Hitchens

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind. — Susan Sontag

The way contemporary literature is emerging, soon we can expect "Item poetry" in novels. — Himmilicious

As long as people believe in the written word and a good story.. They will believe in me. — Solange Nicole

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity — Alison Bechdel

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

The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense. — Kenneth McLeish

One problem with the work of the New Critics was that their close readings, no matter how brilliant, could not deliver all they seemed to promise. — Jewel Spears Brooker

Informative and understandable, even for non-techies like me... — Eva Hunter

In 1922 Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was to join Vanessa Bell and Leonard Woolf as the most significant people in her life. — Jane Goldman

The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort. — Vladimir Nabokov

This is the real warning of Nineteen Eighty-Four: The danger comes not from our suppressors but from our ovine willingness to be suppressed. — William Giraldi

Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell. — Erica Jong

What Shelley's world of Prometheus Unbound really has to fear is not resurrection of Jupiter but the resurrection of John Donne. — Cleanth Brooks

In literary and art criticism there are two criteria, the political and the artistic. — Mao Zedong

If you tell me bad things about someone, you're telling bad things about me behind me — Miguel El Portugues

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive. — Clifford Geertz

What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character? — David Mitchell

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature. — Umberto Eco

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism. — Kate Zambreno

CUSTOMER (to her friend): What's this literary criticism section? Is it for books that complain about other books? — Jen Campbell

When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say. — Mason Cooley

Hacks are killing our national literary culture. America treats best-sellers like literary lions and literary lions worse than stray dogs. — David B. Lentz

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics. — Mason Cooley

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready'. — David Mitchell

But with whom, in the Pooh world, could a sexually and politically aroused Kanga speak? — Frederick C. Crews

Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes. — Sherwood Anderson

Reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers ... annotations, arrows ... an oudine of its design ... very seriously mislead. — William H Gass

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

Literature is news which stays news. — Ezra Pound

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

Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade. — George Steiner

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw - that of outright unreadability. — Martin Amis

The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress. — C.S. Lewis

Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism. — Mason Cooley

A man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. — George Orwell

Analogies are like lies. — Roman Payne

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something. — H.L. Mencken

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms. — Irwin Shaw

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry. — Oscar Wilde

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

If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic. — Roman Payne

The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time. — Tacita Dean

A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation. — C.S. Lewis

Apparently, faith in life is one thing and faith in literature is another. — Gerald Weaver

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them. — Flannery O'Connor