Literary Criticism Quotes

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.

~ Northrop Frye

The most important thing about reading is not the level of sophistication of the books on your self. There is no prerequisite reading regimen for being a bookworm.

~ Lauren Leto

Nature to all things fixed the limits fitAnd wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.As on the land while here the ocean gains.In other parts it leaves wide sandy plainsThus in the soul while memory prevails,The solid power of understanding failsWhere beams of warm imagination play,The memory's soft figures melt awayOne science only will one genius fit,So vast is art, so narrow human witNot only bounded to peculiar arts,But oft in those confined to single partsLike kings, we lose the conquests gained before,By vain ambition still to make them moreEach might his several province well command,Would all but stoop to what they understand.

~ Alexander Pope

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

A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless.And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your ennui for an hour has proved its usefulness.You have a good memory. It must have been ten thousands of years ago that I uttered those words.And if it was?In another ten thousand, perhaps I will agree with them again.In my opinion, the proper way to judge a novel is this: Does it give one an accurate reflection of the moods and characteristics of a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time? If so, it has value. Otherwise, it has none.You do not find this rather narrow?Madam—Well?I was quoting you.

~ Steven Brust

The notion of literature as only one of several avenues to a single typeof propositional knowledge is, of course, hardly the winning ticket in lit-crit today. More typical are sentiments that see such a notion as not even admissible, if at all desirable. The world of these academic refuseniks is, however, a bleak and sterile place. Disarmed by their own epistemic fiat, scholars cannot assert anything since they deny the idea of objective rationality. If they arrive at an insight whose truth they wish to defend – for example that truth and rationality are passé – they can’t do so because truth and rationality are constructed to be constructed.

~ Peter Swirski

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

~ D.h. Lawrence

If someone's personhood is in doubt (or seen as lacking), all the easier to direct death wishes at them. When a tiny minority of them transgresses, their crimes of violence only confirm their abjection from the human [. . .] Anxiety, threat, dread, fear, and prejudice feed into the explanatory mechanisms that construct them as somehow beyond human, beyond mercy.

~ José Alaniz

Mankind is immortalin the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of naturebut by virtue of man's subjection to it. The fall in tragedy ends indeath; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,one and one make a brand new one.

~ Rose A. Zimbardo

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

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Even at the moment when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left of it?

~ Percy Lubbock

Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it . . . The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I wanted to flee from Thomas's house.

~ Janet Malcolm

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

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

For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership issue. Who, other than its creator, is to say what a work of fiction means or is worth? It can take years to write a novel and only a few hours for a critic, or a reviewer rushing for a tight deadline, to trash it.

~ John Sutherland

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

If you were to stare at this box of matches, you could extract entire worlds out of it. If you search for tastes in a book, you will certainly find them because it was said: seek and ye shall find. But a critic should not rifle, search. Let him sit back with folded arms, waiting for the book to find him. Talents should not be sought with a microscope, a talent should let people know about itself by striking at all the bells.

~ Witold Gombrowicz

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

~ Harold Bloom

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

~ Irwin Shaw

Beware of the man who denounces woman writers, his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.

~ Erica Jong

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

In my freshman and sophomore years of college, I read dozens of books by the great thinkers of Western civilization. From Plato to Nietzsche, Homer to Shakespeare - you name it, I read it. At times it drove me crazy - picture reading hundreds of pages that sound like this every week: All rational knowledge is either material and concerned with some object, or formal and concerned only with the form of understanding and of reason themselves and with the universal rules of thought in general without regard to differences of its objects. Come again, Kant?

~ Stefanie Weisman

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

~ William H. Gass

We should bear in mind the supercrip stereotype as a figure obsessively, indeed maniacally, over-compensating for a perceived physical difference or lack, since, as we shall see, this aspect ties in quite neatly with the genre specificities and narratival concerns of so much Silver Age superhero literature.

~ José Alaniz

Social class. Class remains our national awkward topic, usually mumbled over in academic diversity workshops; indeed, most people don't know how to talk about class without automatically coupling it with race. That's because we Americans are loath to recognize that the sky's-the-limit potential we take as our birthright comes at a price far beyond what many Americans--of any race--can afford to pay.

~ Maureen Corrigan

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

~ Himmilicious