Anne Stevenson Quotes

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 world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.

In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.

Universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

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

At Harvard, I majored in English Literature.

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.

The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to know it in any reputable sense of the word - let alone your learning to write English - is, in short, impossible.

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

We take literature too seriously.

I grew up reading a lot on literature and all of that.

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.

From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.

In the course of my research, I've read a lot of incredibly bad books - mostly by academics. I'm puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.

I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.

I did always think of Heinlein as a strict rationalist, although a dispassionate examination of his works doesn't support that.