Analysis Quote by David Lodge

Inevitably, almost everything we say is either quotation or paraphrase.

— Mason Cooley

“If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal…

— Cleanth Brooks

[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence…

— Marianne Moore

“…Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you;…

— Martin Amis

Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the…

— Dana Gioia

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not…

— Gore Vidal

A literary critic is a person who finds meaning in literature that the author didn't know was there.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the…

— John Ciardi

“The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense.”

— Kenneth McLeish

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music,…

— Paul Auster

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct…

— Susan Sontag