Stephen Michael Stirling Quotes

There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.

We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.

They were like English teachers who took the fun out of a perfectly good book by breaking it down into themes and sentence structures

If we took Chaucer's writings at face value, we'd have to conclude he was a complete drip.

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.

I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature.

But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

Reader look, not on his picture but his book.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

It's different to read a book for pleasure than to read it analytically. In the past, I'd read Pride and Prejudice for pleasure. This time, I was really looking at the structure, the order of events, how the characters interact with each other and how the book is paced.

That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

REVIEW, v.t. To set your wisdom (holding not a doubt of it./ Although in truth there's neither bone nor skin to it)/ At work upon a book, and so read out of it/ The qualities that you have first read into it.

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.