18 quotes found
“...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to...”
“Literature is news which stays news.”
“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, When youre ready.”
“I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism without ignoring the political dimension. Even if I have failed i...”
“If you tell me bad things about someone, you're telling bad things about me behind me”
“You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”
“These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.”
“When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature”
“Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its str...”
“Literature has become merely a tool for culture studies.”
“The notion of literature as only one of several avenues to a single typeof propositional knowledge is, of course, hardly the winning ticket in lit-crit today. More typical are sentiments that see s...”
“A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless.""And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your ennui for an ...”
“Even at the moment when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left of it?”
“If you were to stare at this box of matches, you could extract entire worlds out of it. If you search for tastes in a book, you will certainly find them because it was said: seek and ye shall find....”
“Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.”
“Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.”
