“These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.” — Christine de Pizan Copy Share Image
The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things. — W. Somerset Maugham Copy Share Image
“Like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Woolf ’s first novel is a self-conscious meditation on… — Jane Goldman Copy Share Image
“...reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead.” — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are… — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and… — John Steinbeck Copy Share Image
“The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense.” — Kenneth McLeish Copy Share Image
“Most critics agree with the seventeenth-century printer who gave them to the world, that the Mutabilitie Cantos seem to be part of… — Janet Spens Copy Share Image
“Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don't try it. You should leave that to people who haven't been at… — Oscar Wilde Copy Share Image
In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary… — Joanne Harris Copy Share Image
“Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus… — Douglas R. Hofstadter Copy Share Image
“However, for Hardy the possibility of poetry’s traditional function of transcendence remains, but in a more limited form. In Hardy’s work the… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“Tess is not simply presented as a passive victim, however. Throughout the novel she is shown as experiencing tension between the intractable… — Geoffrey Harvey Copy Share Image
“[T]his is how it will remain until ... literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity… — Vladimir Nabokov Copy Share Image
“It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
“Mankind is immortal in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature but by virtue of man's subjection to… — Rose A. Zimbardo Copy Share Image
“We have then, in the first part of The Faerie Queene, four of the seven deadly sins depicted in the more important… — Janet Spens Copy Share Image
“Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov,… — Roberto Bolaño Copy Share Image
“THE METAPHYSICAL POETS Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime (Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress)… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“There may even be a real relation between certain kinds of effectiveness in literature and totalitarianism in politics. But although the fictions… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“It is the voice of everyday people, rather than of a self-conscious 'artist', that we hear in Caedmon's Hymn, and in such… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The… — Roberto Bolaño Copy Share Image
“In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a landmark. The volume contains many of… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“In fact this desire for consonance in the apocalyptic data, and our tendency to be derisive about it, seem to me equally… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“I tossed up whether I'd see [the critic] or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“There are long stretches of the work [Paradise Lost] that are for anyone not theologically minded sheer howling boredom from the point… — Marco Mincoff Copy Share Image
“It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the… — John Leonard Copy Share Image
I don't believe in pulling punches or being judicious, as the standard in literary criticism or academic musicology. — Robert Christgau Copy Share Image
“Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to… — Germaine Greer Copy Share Image
“How can the Book Award Judges’ decision be right when we know that submitting the same books to different panels will result… — Mouloud Benzadi Copy Share Image
“The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is… — D. H. Lawrence Copy Share Image
“There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable… — Christopher Hitchens Copy Share Image
“Attempts to connect men's circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.” — C.S. Lewis Copy Share Image
“I don’t generally publicly respond to reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers’… — China Miéville Copy Share Image
“...If you genuinely believe that only the death of a loved one can motivate a human being to take up a cause...then… — Mark Waid Copy Share Image
“Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else—that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to… — George Orwell Copy Share Image
![“[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.” quote by Vladimir Nabokov](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/e47/vladimir-nabokov-198_criticism_t-his-is-how-it-will-remain-until-litera_2511149.jpg)
![“I tossed up whether I'd see [the critic] or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing.” quote by Graham Greene](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/dc1/graham-greene-441_literary-criticism_i-tossed-up-whether-i-d-see-the-critic-o_72760.jpg)
![“There are long stretches of the work [Paradise Lost] that are for anyone not theologically minded sheer howling boredom from the point of view of the content.” quote by Marco Mincoff](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/db0/marco-mincoff-259438_boredom_there-are-long-stretches-of-the-work-par_2353428.jpg)
![“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]” quote by Northrop Frye](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/82e/northrop-frye-3483_art_the-genuine-artist-harris-is-saying-find_1440969.jpg)
