214 Quotes About Literary-criticism

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

You can kill a book quicker by your silence than by a bad review.

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.

I would have died, before a literary agent ever committed to my book. This is why I chose to empower myself by self publishing.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.

That's why literature is so fascinating. It's always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's never the same thing twice.

The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.