Clive James Quotes

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.

It is easy to criticize an author, but difficult to appreciate him.

This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast.

There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.

We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal.

I skip the introduction. If the book goes in the trash, I want it to go because of my thoughts on it, not because of some Asshole's thoughts who wrote the introduction.

If you read, you'll judge.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change.

When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

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

You cannot have adoration without being criticized.

Critics matter to me a lot.

Critics tend to praise as well as crucify you.

Properly speaking, we learn from those books only that we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticise would have to learn from me.

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.

You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.

A reader is doubly guilty of bad manners against an author when he praises his second book at the expense of his first (or vice versa) and then expects the author to be grateful for what he has done.

A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.

He who first praises a book becomingly is next in merit to the author.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.

REVIEW, v.t. To set your wisdom (holding not a doubt of it./ Although in truth there's neither bone nor skin to it)/ At work upon a book, and so read out of it/ The qualities that you have first read into it.