Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

A critic knows more than the author he criticizes, or just as much, or at least somewhat less.

If you read, you'll judge.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.

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.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

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.

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.

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.

A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.

I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

Some critics are like chimney-sweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from their nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing from the top of the house as if they had built it.

Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.

Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.

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.

For critics, as they are birds of prey, have ever a natural inclination to carrion.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

I'm confused, and brilliant books help me to be less so.

Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.

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.