Top Literary Criticism Quotes

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering...

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is t...

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

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 leavin...

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

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

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 p...

You can kill a book quicker by your silence than by a bad review.

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the ki...

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nine...

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that , in his second novel, , published in 1935, had borrowed from for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where...

Mr. Morris's poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous ,—a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its succes...

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 interpret...

In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]

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

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

A book can’t be a half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.