Virginia Woolf Quotes

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

I don't care about my "impact" - I only care about the theater as an art form and criticism as an act of writing.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.

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

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticising the works of others.

If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.

Very nice couplet, although there are dull stretches.

Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.