top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Critic
"Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps."
21
"If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem."
Body,
21
"His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship."
21
"All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music."
19
"Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred."
19
"There is something supremely reassuring about television; the worst is always yet to come."
18
"Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure."
18
"When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture."
18
"Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another."
18
"We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love."
18
"We all get swept up in the hype machine. Nobody is immune to that."
17
"Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away."
16
"Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers."
16
"The Rockwell magazine cover was more a part of the American reality than a record of it."
16
"In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends."
16
"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window."
16
"The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards."
16
"White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or be oppressed. Black men may be victimized by racism, but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of women. White women may be victimized by sexism, but racism enables them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black people. Both groups have led liberation movements that favor their interests and support the continued oppression of other groups. Black male sexism has undermined struggles to eradicate racism just as white female racism undermines feminist struggle. As long as these two groups or any group defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling class white men, they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others."
16
"Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death."
16
"You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world."
16
"On the whole, the world was friendly. It chiefly depended on whether one were good or not."
16
"A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong."
16
"The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy."
16
"Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you."
15
"The criteria, for me, is movie star. It's Hollywood. Not Somalia."
15
"The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster."
15
"I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist."
15
"Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book."
15
"We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity."
14
"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
14
"He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies."
14
"We pacifists have not ceased to point to the grave danger of armaments and to insist on their curtailment."
14
"Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them."
Old,
14
bottom of page