Lionel Shriver Quotes

You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.

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

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are.

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.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Judgment is very easy, but I think, on the whole, professional critics maybe see too much, and compare too much, and forget the joy of actually looking and contemplating for its own sake.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

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

Reason can be used only when looking critically back.

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher.

Also, many consumers consider a critic to be like God Almighty.

But you know, really, if you think about it Roger and I and all critics really have one absolute essential part of our credentials and that is that you believe that that is actually what we think.

I guess you'd have to say that sometimes the audience is smarter than the critics.

For I am nothing if not critical.

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.

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

Things are not to be judged good or bad merely because the public think so.

Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits, but not by their age

Criticism, though dignified from the earliest ages by the labours of men eminent for knowledge and sagacity, has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science.

Never accept an expert's opinion if it violates your own because the experts can change their minds.

Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.