Mason Cooley Quotes

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

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

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.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them, there would be no work.

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.

What's wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They're so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

Shakespeare belongs to the whole of mankind, not just one country.

We take literature too seriously.

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.

The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.

When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.

There's nothing sacred about the book you've written. The Bible says there's safety in a multitude of counselors. The movie is the movie, and the book is the book. They're different critters, and each must stand on their own merits.

What I find remarkable is that so much of the 18th century literature that I read is more accessible than reading your alternative weekly from ten years ago. People really aspired to write clearly.

Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?