Louis Dudek Quotes

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

Some critics are like chimney-sweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from their nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing from the top of the house as if they had built it.

For critics, as they are birds of prey, have ever a natural inclination to carrion.

Pedants make a great rout about criticism, as if it were a science of great depth, and required much pains and knowledge--criticism however is only the result of good sense, taste and judgment--three qualities that indeed seldom are found together, and extremely seldom in a pedant, which most critics are.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.

There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

I've always been terribly uninterested in criticism. And one of the reasons, I just thought recently, is that you know there are various schools of criticism that will compete, and one will supercede the other.

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.

For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn’t written for poets, it’s written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it’s true for oneself.

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.