Top 36 Literary Critics Quotes
#1. It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.
Will Self
#2. Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.
Thomas Pynchon
#3. I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'
Gore Vidal
#4. I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel ... I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.
Anatole Broyard
#5. Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.
Robertson Davies
#6. Poetry is often very critical of the culture from which it emerges. Quite often literary critics of a nationalist bent talk up the national culture, in a way that the literary texts don't. Poetry can bring out areas of denial and repression.
Edna Longley
#7. I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
Salman Rushdie
#8. Literary critics make natural detectives.
A.S. Byatt
#9. Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.
Edward Abbey
#10. It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them.
Kurt Vonnegut
#11. To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
Nelson Algren
#12. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
Richard Dawkins
#13. I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").
Philip Kitcher
#14. The Lord of the Rings is a million times more interesting than mere literature, which is why mere literary critics cannot get to grips with it.
Robert McNeil
#15. Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?
Amy Tan
#16. Some Critics on the Hearth are not only good-natured, but have rather too high, or, if that is impossible, let us say too pronounced, an opinion of the abilities of their literary friends.
James Payn
#17. I think there's a ton of fear in the perception of romance in part because there's something very realistic in great romance - namely, that women have the right to demand relationships that are based on equality and honesty and trust and, yes, a great sex life.
Sarah MacLean
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
Irwin Shaw
#21. Most critics agree with the seventeenth-century printer who gave them to the world, that the Mutabilitie Cantos seem to be part of some following book of The Faerie Queene.
Janet Spens
#23. The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
Will Self
#24. Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.
Kate Atkinson
#25. If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.
Jack Kerouac
#26. 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
#27. The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.
Edward Abbey
#28. When it comes to overcoming writing hurdles, getting sick is like suffering a review from a critic with an axe to grind; you can't let it get you down!
Max Hawthorne
#29. In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them ... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again.
Helen Vendler
#30. As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
Kurt Vonnegut
#31. The most accomplished literary work would be reduced to nothing by carping criticism, if the author would listen to all critics and allow every one to erase the passage which pleases him the least.
Jean De La Bruyere
#32. 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
#33. I don't generally publicly respond to
reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers' responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.
China Mieville
#34. In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.
Joanne Harris
#35. 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
#36. The stereotype of the supercrip, in the eyes of its critics, represents a sort of overachieving, overdetermined self-enfreakment that distracts from the lived daily reality of most disabled people.
Jose Alaniz
