214 Quotes About Literary-criticism

Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes.

When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it. But since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves. What they call anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, is nothing but literature reappearing like the hydra's head in the very spot where it had been suppressed. The human mind will go through amazing feats to avoid facing 'the nothingness of human matters'.

Surely you do not think that criticism is like the answer to a sum. The richer the work of art the more diverse are the true interpretations. There is not one answer only, but many answers. I pity that book on which critics are agreed. It must be a very obvious and shallow production.

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

Apparently, faith in life is one thing and faith in literature is another.