Alexander Pope Quotes

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.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

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

It is the heart that makes the critic, not the nose.

Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.

I think everyone does selective reading. Everybody has a filter, and that is real easy for critics to see things from their perspectives, and I'm going, I didn't mean that at all. And believers do the same.

God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.

Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

No one is a good judge in his own cause.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

People are going to assume whatever they want to assume.

You can't judge people for favouring somebody. That happens in every field.

Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

We do not judge men by what they are in themselves, but by what they are relatively to us.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may, by mere labour, be obtained, is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert some judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of critic.

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

It is easy to criticize an author, but difficult to appreciate him.

I hate perception. There's far too much of it in football

What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book.

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

Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.