Tao Lin Quotes

As a student, I wrote English reports on science fiction.

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.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens

So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

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.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

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.

So many book sections in newspapers and magazines used to be lively and vibrant places. Now they are gone. You just don't see many reviews anymore. I can't control that, so I don't worry about it. I just try to do what I do and write books that people find every entertaining. I don't worry about the critics.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

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.

To read is human, to review is divine.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.

Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

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

Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men.

When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.

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.