Mason Cooley Quotes

Critic's delight: scolding the Mighty Dead.

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

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

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

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!

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

If we took Chaucer's writings at face value, we'd have to conclude he was a complete drip.

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

Of the modern critics, although I disagree with almost everything she says, I admire Mary McCarthy's eloquence and social observation in 'Sights and Spectacles'; she thinks in print, but she doesn't have a real feel for the stage.

The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.

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.

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

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish he was dead.' Influence is perdition.

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.

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

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?

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing.

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.'

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

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.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

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.