George Balanchine Quotes

I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as "task" or "role" when they are attached to literature.

I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious.

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

I wish I had read more and majored in literature rather than theatre. I think I would have been a better artist for it. I am trying to play catch-up now.

We take literature too seriously.

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

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative.

That complete statement which is literature.

We must not inquire too curiously into the absolute value of literature. Enough that it amuses and exercises us. At least it leaves us where we were. It names things, but does not add things.

I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.

You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.

If you can't really have a conversation with someone candidly about it it's something that you'll always have something to learn from when it comes to taking a literature class.

One hates an author that's all author.

A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

I teach literature. That's easy for me. Take someone else's work and talk about it.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

I've always been terribly uninterested in criticism. And one of the reasons, I just thought recently, is that you know there are various schools of criticism that will compete, and one will supercede the other.

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

It's really easy to project this whole ideology of what being an artiste is, and I'm just not down with intellectualizing it. I just think, if you feel like doing something, then do it.

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

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.