top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Criticism quotes
"Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer's dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist?"
"He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public-an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary."
"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."
"A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation."
"Some poems are written great, some poems are written swell. But then there are poems that could win a prize in Hell."
"We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease."
"Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me."
"We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be."
Explore more quotes by E. B. White
"The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people."
"I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat."
"There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement."
bottom of page