Quotes About Literary Criticism

#1. Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages.

Bill Vaughan

#2. The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.

H.L. Mencken

#3. Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He would be able, as far as literary criticism is concerned, to rest.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#4. 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

#5. A linguistically informed literary criticism is the key to resolving conflict and frustration, from psychotherapy and law to philosophy and politics. Call this the messianic theory. It is based on the idea that TO THINK IS TO GRASP A METAPHOR-the metaphor metaphor.

Steven Pinker

#6. Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else - that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.

George Orwell

#7. Poststructuralism ... is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

Naomi Wolf

#8. Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#9. If I like a movie, I'm definitely advocating for it, but it's not "you should see this" or "you shouldn't see this." I try to take a longer view about what the movie is doing and where it fits in the context of other things, in the way that certain good literary criticism tries to do the same thing.

Wesley Morris

#10. Because it exists as a living sonority, music is animated by voices, and these voices do not evaporate when music confronts the insights of contemporary literary criticism, or philosophy of language.

Carolyn Abbate

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

Jeffrey Eugenides

#14. 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

#15. When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.

Jonathan Meades

#16. Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.

Terry Pratchett

#17. Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Anne Stevenson

#19. I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.

Dave Eggers

#20. One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.

Louis Menand

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

George Steiner

#22. Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism.

Mason Cooley

#23. I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

Alison Bechdel

#24. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

George Orwell

#25. CUSTOMER (to her friend): What's this literary criticism section? Is it for books that complain about other books?

Jen Campbell

#26. By deciding what is, and is not, allowed to be discussed in a review,
by removing discussion of social context, and saying that only the
words on the page count, Goodreads is ignoring fifty years of development
of literary criticism, and is engaging in censorship.

G.R. Reader

#27. Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit.

John Fante

#28. When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say.

Mason Cooley

#29. In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.

Stephen King

#30. Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,
historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on.

Jane Goldman

#31. 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

#32. [T]his is how it will remain until ... literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire itself. Only then will you be free to say what you please. [F]or God's sake stop that irrelevant chitchat.

Vladimir Nabokov

#33. The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense.

Kenneth McLeish

#34. Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

Mason Cooley

#35. If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book ... it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.

Tao Lin

#36. Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth.

Douglas R. Hofstadter

#37. 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

#38. Mankind is immortal
in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature
but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in
death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,
one and one make a brand new one.

Rose A. Zimbardo

#39. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

Harold Bloom

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

Terry Pratchett

#41. From the very moment of Kanga's appearance the pastoral playground is overshadowed by doubt and guilt, for the all-too-loving anima-Woman has pitched her temple here!

Frederick C. Crews

#42. Literature is news which stays news.

Ezra Pound

#43. (Feedback) People become addicted to it. That's why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

Zadie Smith

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

Tacita Dean

#45. Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear."
"Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices?"
"I went for Lear," said Leon. "Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.

China Mieville

#46. 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

#47. When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature

Tzvetan Todorov

#48. At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me.
I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

Alison Bechdel

#49. 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

#50. Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.

C.S. Lewis

#51. It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.

John Leonard

#52. 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

#53. Lovecraft dangles like a rabbit from the jaws of his unconscious.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Susan Sontag

#55. 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

#56. Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet's glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because

Virginia Heffernan

#57. The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]

Northrop Frye

#58. But with whom, in the Pooh world, could a sexually and politically aroused Kanga speak?

Frederick C. Crews

#59. When I became a poet, the Korean literary world expected women poets to sing passively of love. Naturally, this was not written anywhere, but this rule existed nonetheless. Consequently, I received plenty of serious criticism.

Kim Hyesoon

#60. To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

Nelson Algren

#61. 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

#62. However, for Hardy the possibility of poetry's traditional function of transcendence remains, but in a more limited form. In Hardy's work the poet transcends himself towards humanity, affirming the central values of loving-kindness and fellowship.

Geoffrey Harvey

#63. 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

#64. In my view, the gospels are true, not historically, but theologically, or, as I would argue, prophetically! What we have is, the Messiah's history written in advance in story form.

Eli Of Kittim

#65. If you genuinely believe that only the death of a loved one can motivate a human being to take up a cause ... then get your pathetic, cynical ass out of my way so I can do my job!

Mark Waid

#66. Hacks are killing our national literary culture. America treats best-sellers like literary lions and literary lions worse than stray dogs.

David B. Lentz

#67. Leslie Stephen died in 1904. In that year his children retreated to Wales for a period and then travelled in Italy. Vanessa and Virginia went on to Paris, where they met up with Clive Bell. On returning to London, Virginia suffered
a severe, suicidal breakdown.

Jane Goldman

#68. In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.

Ian Gregor

#69. It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.

C.S. Lewis

#70. [In "The Night Gwen Stacy Died"], death took on an existential quality -- the beloved, innocent but weak Gwen is merely a victim, the casualty of a war between superpowered rivals -- and as such the episode proved a turning point int eh genre's depiction of mortality.

Jose Alaniz

#71. 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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

H.L. Mencken

#74. 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

#75. Informative and understandable, even for non-techies like me...

Eva Hunter

#76. I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing ... is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this - the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea.

Harper Lee

#77. Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets
themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

C.S. Lewis

#78. No, I wasn't trying to make Nat Turner look stupid. I was trying to make him more human. More like me. Angry, impotent, confused about his own sexuality. Wait a minute, that didn't come out right. Is that microphone really on?

William Styron

#79. 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

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

Georges Duhamel

#81. If you tell me bad things about someone, you're telling bad things about me behind me

Miguel El Portugues

#82. The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. [p.211]

Northrop Frye

#83. 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

#84. [N]o such thing as objective writing, ... every inscription, every traveler's tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the ostensible subject.

Sue Hubbell

#85. Reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers ... annotations, arrows ... an oudine of its design ... very seriously mislead.

William H Gass

#86. Sympathy once more reveals its limits when faced with madness.

Jose Alaniz

#87. Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.

Germaine Greer

#88. I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.

Jess C. Scott

#89. Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.
(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

Salman Rushdie

#90. All writers misspeak, revealing not what they thought they said, but almost what they were afraid to say.

Charles E. Bressler

#91. Each work of criticism is supposed to build on the body of work, to increase the total sum of human understanding. It's not like filling your house with more and more beautiful wicker baskets. It's supposed to be cumulative - it believes in progress.

Elif Batuman

#92. The literary wiseacres prognosticate in many languages, as they have throughout so many centuries, setting the stage for new hautmonde in letters and making up the public's mind.

Fannie Hurst

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

Joseph Joubert

#94. The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight in this great poet which thrilled his contemporaries and early successors.

Janet Spens

#95. In the analysis of books, as in the analysis of complex world events, we hover between two kinds of error: ascribing too much meaning where there is little, if any, to be found, and ignoring meaning that stares us right in the face.

J.C. Hallman

#96. In the context of Lawrence's rejection of the Freudian notion of incest and the close identification between author and character, Sons and Lovers becomes an exercise in deliberate ambiguity.

John E. Stoll

#97. Rabbit and Owl are aging bachelors whose respective megalomania and fussiness are tempered only by their mutual friendship, of which the less said, the better.

Frederick C. Crews

#98. That's why literature is so fascinating. It's always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's never the same thing twice.

Sara Raasch

#99. In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people.

C.S. Lewis

#100. Lawrence's claims for the vital self and his inability to make it
convincing independently of Freudian psychology are serious flaws in the novel, explain the sense in which the author's vision exceeds his grasp, and bring the cleavage between intention and performance into clear perspective.

John E. Stoll