Books Quote by Todorov Tzvetan

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

— Italo Calvino

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— Kenneth McLeish

The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy; that which rises in spite of him he will not see; and then…

— Thomas Love Peacock

“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

“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

“[T]his is how it will remain until ... literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire…

— Vladimir Nabokov

“The critic's aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and help readers appreciate it, by defining and analysing those qualities…

— David Cecil

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

— Mignon McLaughlin

“literature is but the shadow of good talk”

— simon blackburn

“Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas…

— Toni Morrison

I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.

— Salman Rushdie