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.
The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.
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...
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...
If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic.
You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
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.
To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory pipe dreams is right also.
A book can’t be a half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.
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 outb...
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...
In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
The Bloomsbury Group has been characterised as a liberal, pacifist, and at times libertine, intellectual enclave of Cambridge-based privilege. The Cambridge men of the group (Bell, Forster, Fry, Keyne...
What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?
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.
Do not start me on
But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book so that his very absence becomes a kind of radiant presence. As the French say, il brille par son a...
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.
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 poeti...
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