Sophie Kinsella Quotes

It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

What kind of an idiotic question is that?

I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.

If you have any helpful suggestions I'd be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.

I've always admired your ability to be unilaterally irritating.

Don't clap I'm not a jazz band for Christ's sake.

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

Oh, for God's sake... get a life, will you?

You need to be more careful, or you could hurt yourself." Right. Thank you, Mrs. Detweiler. I never would have come to that conclusion by myself. I was planning on incorporating a backflip into my next walk across the classroom but on second thought.

I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").

Well, that's a 'fresher'. I'm going on break.

Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

Too bad we don't have a flashlight." "Thanks for stating the obvious, Mr. Thomas," Minho replied.

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

You know, I'm normally so sanguine. But... being accused of rushing these two books out to cash in on the Newbery Medal, without access to time travel equipment or anything, just makes me want to bang my forehead gently against a tree for half an hour. Is it too much to ask people to think?

Sarah: That's not fair! Jareth: You say that so often, I wonder what your basis for comparison is?

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

Pooh hater,' I muttered under my breath. 'Winnie-the-Pooh was not a koala--why am I even arguing about this with you?

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.

Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

you can go to the Devil and not at your leisure. You can go now, for all I care.' 'My pet, I've been to the Devil and he's a very dull fellow. I won't go there again, not even for you.