Christopher Hampton Quotes

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

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

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.

No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction you're going to get bashed by critics.

There are many critics who have an idealised version of where my strengths lie.

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

I don't read the critics.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

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.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

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.

Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticising the works of others.

If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

The animadversions of critics are commonly such as may easily provoke the sedatest writer to some quickness of resentment and asperity of reply.