All Quotes By Tag: Literary-criticism
“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I’ll waste no time reading it.”
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“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.”
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“Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don’t mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery….I hate it because of all the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive.”
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“Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code … a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.”(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)”
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“The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.”
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“Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn’t stifle enough of them.”
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“You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”
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“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.”[Time Magazine, October 31, 1977]”
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“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.”
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“I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.”
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“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”
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“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”
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“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.”
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“I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)… ‘I spoke to three scholars,’ [the character says ‘at last.’] …two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]’ …I can see that he’s excited. [narrator]’ …Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a ‘literary’ writer based on this quote. A ‘literary’ author knows that a character’s excitement should be ‘shown’ in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator’s commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the ‘I can see that he’s excited’ sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho … Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), ‘a remote human possibility.’ He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!”
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“Стихи нельзя объяснить – только понять.”
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