Roy Blount Jr. Quotes

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.

I was a literature major in college and that was my thing, books.

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.

My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.

'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it.

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.

Our higher education system is one of the things that makes America exceptional. There's no place else that has the assets we do when it comes to higher education. People from all over the world aspire to come here and study here. And that is a good thing.

I have a huge passion for literature.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.

I excelled in English while I was at school.

If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.

For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.

My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.

I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

I wish I had read more and majored in literature rather than theatre. I think I would have been a better artist for it. I am trying to play catch-up now.

I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn't end up really doing that in the end.

My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.