372 quotes found
“A person never rise by pulling others down.”
“When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious place...”
“People quick to criticize others, but won't shine the light on themselves. You can't always judge a book by the outside appearance. You have to open it up and read in order to discover how precious...”
“All Im arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where theres no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to...”
“What you think of your self is more important than what others think of you.”
“The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever hap...”
“In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.”
“Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling disple...”
“The literary text seems like "a fortified medieval town foreigners and outsiders are repelled, or allowed in only after rigorous checks, but within all is bustling life; exchange, mutual interdepen...”
“The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.”
“A Christian message or moral cannot redeem a text marred by shoddy workmanship.”
“The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding”
“Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them i...”
“A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.”
“So whenever that brittle voice of dissatisfaction emerges within me, I can say "Ah, my ego! There you are, old friend!" It's the same thing when I'm being criticized and I notice myself reaching wi...”
“There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. H...”
“He left to do whatever editors do.”
“When we criticize the suicidal for being selfish, we are actually criticizing them for not enduring their pain with grace and good manners. These are nice qualities; we may be correct to reproach a...”
“Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation--who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him--but he must go on wri...”
“Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”
