The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
“But there is a third mode of trancendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
“The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
