“In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality… — Ian Gregor Copy Share Image
Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He would be able, as… — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Copy Share Image
“In 1922 Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was to join Vanessa Bell and Leonard Woolf as the most significant people… — Jane Goldman Copy Share Image
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic. — Anne Stevenson Copy Share Image
“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs." [ Time Magazine , October 31, 1977]” — John Osborne Copy Share Image
The literary wiseacres prognosticate in many languages, as they have throughout so many centuries, setting the stage for new hautmonde in letters… — Fannie Hurst Copy Share Image
“Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of… — Claude Calame Copy Share Image
“Writers in what we now call the Middle English period (late twelfth century to 1485) did not necessarily always write in English.… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism… — Christopher Hitchens Copy Share Image
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
“As a novelist, Scott's influence was immense: his creation of a wide range of characters from all levels of society was immediately… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“The fairy or fantastic world replaces the classical Hades (or Hell) in Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight takes… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range… — Jane Goldman Copy Share Image
“In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of… — Jane Goldman Copy Share Image
“Lawrence's claims for the vital self and his inability to make it convincing independently of Freudian psychology are serious flaws in the… — John E. Stoll Copy Share Image
“The sin of Book I is at first sight more obscure, but it is particularly significant. We have seen that there appear… — Janet Spens Copy Share Image
“The degree of rigidity is a matter of profound interest in the study of literary fictions. As an extreme case you will… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was… — Ronald Carter Copy Share Image
“A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is… — Steven Brust Copy Share Image
“It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“It may be true that we all have a novel inside of us. Better in than out in the present case. Burning… — Rodney Ulyate Copy Share Image
“My husband claims I have an unhealthy obsession with secondhand bookshops. That I spend too much time daydreaming altogether. But either you… — Kathleen Tessaro Copy Share Image
“Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to… — Christopher Hitchens Copy Share Image
“The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.” — Tacita Dean Copy Share Image
“It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals.… — C.S. Lewis Copy Share Image
“One problem with the work of the New Critics was that their close readings, no matter how brilliant, could not deliver all… — Jewel Spears Brooker Copy Share Image
Criticism even should not be without its charms. When quite devoid of all amenities, it is no longer literary. — Joseph Joubert Copy Share Image
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the… — John Kenneth Galbraith Copy Share Image
“When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence… — Todorov Tzvetan Copy Share Image
“Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language… — Naomi Wolf Copy Share Image
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are… — George Orwell Copy Share Image
“The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.” — Vladimir Nabokov Copy Share Image
“While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.” — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
“The study of the form is the betting man's philology, philosophy, science, and literary criticism all rolled into one.” — Theodore Dalrymple Copy Share Image
“Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight… — Janet Spens Copy Share Image
When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen,… — Jonathan Meades Copy Share Image
The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“What Shelley's world of Prometheus Unbound really has to fear is not resurrection of Jupiter but the resurrection of John Donne.” — Cleanth Brooks Copy Share Image
![“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs." [ Time Magazine , October 31, 1977]” quote by John Osborne](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/cd9/john-osborne-12988_critics_asking-a-working-writer-what-he-thinks-a_2547280.jpg)
![“The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.” quote by Tacita Dean](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a7f/tacita-dean-281246_abandoned_the-heart-of-j-g-ballard-s-vision-is-the_2643659.jpg)
