Karl Kraus Quotes

Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from the circumstances of their creation, and even apart from the intentions of their creator.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

A writer appears in everything that he does. That said, I felt like writing characters with my own name, in fact, provided me with something of a smoke screen.

Man’s writing has but one true sense, which is that which the Author meant when he writ it.

An easy solution for many controversies may be found as long as we are able to be on our guard for the same words being used with conflicting meanings by different authors.

To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically, the horrors of reality. Redemption is the speciality of other authors, male and female.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.

People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'

We take literature too seriously.

It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

Why does a writer labor over nuance and context if it won't be respected, if a critic insists on ignoring the writing at hand in favor of a more convenient analysis of his or her own particular pet peeves and straw men?