Distinctive Quote by Terry Eagleton

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its…

— Nancy Pearcey

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

— John Updike

Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.

— George Orwell

I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works - which are…

— Jennifer Egan

You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.

— Emma Donoghue

“Theory sometimes seems to me a way of taking revenge on literature—the critic masters the text and rewrites it in his own image, instead…

— Adam Kirsch

The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation - a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of…

— Alain Robbe-Grillet

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

— David Hume

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

— Mason Cooley

The failure of modern living is the failure of the imagination...Literature is the royal road that enables us to enter the realm of the…

— Julius Lester

“a novel can best be defined as a long piece of prose with something wrong with it, and”

— Neil Gaiman

The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.

— Alain de Botton