Common ground Quote by Jane Goldman

“Woolf liberates the text, the imagination, the fictional character, and then demands that liberty for ourselves, most particularly for women.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn’t enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition…

— Alain de Botton

“The 1980s: feminism, postmodernism, sexual/textual politics While it might be tempting to generalise that Woolf ’s writing was being discussed almost in two separate…

— Jane Goldman

“Criticism is not a circumscription or a set of prohibitions. It provides fixed points of departure. It may startle a dull reader into alertness.”

— Ezra Pound

“Virginia Woolf said, speaking from the perspective of the writer, that there’s no such thing, objectively, as a good or a bad novel, there’s…

— Joanna Kavenna

“To quote Virginia Woolf, “If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to…

— Pamela Paul

“Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else—that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his…

— George Orwell

“Unable to explore setting, conflict, characters or themes in their fiction, the mainstreamers wrote more and more eloquently about nothing at all.”

— Dave Wolverton

“The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.”

— Susan Sontag

“She looked at Woolf. "There's some kind of ...thing." "That sentence wasn't as helpful as you probably intended it to be," said Marcus.”

— Dan Wells

“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may…

— Roberto Bolano

“I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like…

— Alison Bechdel