Alexander Pope Quotes

One day, when my son was eight, he came into the kitchen while I was cooking and said: 'You put bad words in your books, don't you?' No doubt he had overheard my mother, who often tells people who ask about my work: 'Well, you'll never find her books in the Christian bookstore.'

I have a confession to make. For years, I earned a living - or a sort of living - writing negative book reviews.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Sorry I am to hear the liberty of speech in this house, imputed as a crime. No gentleman ought to be afraid to exercise it. It is a liberty by which the gentleman who calumniates it might have profited, and by which he ought to have profited.

You had better not be resolving against individual action or there will be no end to it. Tomorrow it will be me you censure; then you.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

I hate to badmouth any book or writer, because I know how it feels to be on the other end of that.

Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose.

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

I never knew a critic who made it his business to lash the faults of other writers that was not guilty of greater himself--as the hangman is generally a worse malefactor than the criminal that suffers by his hand.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

When Actions are a Censure upon themselves, the Reciter will always be consider'd as a Satirist.

Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

Critics stopped being relevant when they stopped writing to inform and contextualize, and when they started writing to signal who they are, to display their identity by their stance on what they are writing about. Criticism should never be about the critic, but thats what it has become, and that’s why no one cares about them anymore.

A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment.

When people started reading me and talking to me about the work, they didn't say how funny, or how satiric, or how brilliant, or how this or how that, they said, how'd you get away with it? How'd you get that into print?

Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas. - Censure acquits the raven, but pursues the dove.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

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.

I hear Jerry Falwell every Sunday here talking about the devil and Hollywood. . . . I'm gonna write him a letter. Hollywood wasn't built on filth and dirt - it was built on talent.

The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines...I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them. And that's not funny....OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire.

If I'm a cruel satirist at least I'm not a hyprocrite: I never judge what other people do. Neither a politician nor a priest, I never censor what others do. Neither a philospher nor a psychiatrist, I never bother trying to analyze or resolve my fears and neuroses.

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.