Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.

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 was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

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.

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

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.

Sydney had been horrified to discover my home library consisted of a bartending dictionary and an old copy of Esquire, and at her pleading, I'd promised to read something more substantial. I was trying to think deep thoughts as I read Gatsby, but mostly I wanted to throw some parties.

As by some might be saide of me: that here I have but gathered a nosegay of strange floures, and have put nothing of mine unto it, but the thred to binde them. Certes, I have given unto publike opinion, that these borrowed ornaments accompany me; but I meane not they should cover or hide me.

Literature is a great staff, but a very sorry crutch.

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

One hates an author that's all author.

I bless the gods for not letting my education in rhetoric, poetry, and other literary studies come easily to me, and thereby sparing me from an absorbing interest in these subjects.

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

You’re crazy,” said her best friend, Angela, as the bell rang to signal five minutes before the first class on the first day back at school. “They said that about all the great visionaries.” “You know who else they said it about?” Angela demanded. “All the actual crazy people.

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.

What is literature compared with cooking? The one is shadow, the other is substance.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

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

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.