Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]
If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic.
To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory pipe dreams is right also.
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.
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...
A book can’t be a half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.
The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.
I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in , and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied t...
You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
I would have died, before a literary agent ever committed to my book. This is why I chose to empower myself by self publishing.
[T]he new weird represents a productive experiment in fantasy fiction. The New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s arguably embodied science fiction's claim to literary 'seriousness.' This desire for seriousn...
What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?
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...
Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
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...
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.
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 t...
Do not start me on
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
The double consequence of artifice--to project sentience out onto the made world and in turn to make sentience itself into a complex living artifact--is thus fractured, neatly fractured, into two sepa...