T. S. Eliot Quotes

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.

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

Pedants make a great rout about criticism, as if it were a science of great depth, and required much pains and knowledge--criticism however is only the result of good sense, taste and judgment--three qualities that indeed seldom are found together, and extremely seldom in a pedant, which most critics are.

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.

I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.

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.

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

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

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 writer writes a book. People read it. You don't know what they're reading, really. You read a review and think, "That is so inaccurate. You can't have been reading my book with any kind of attention, because that is all wrong, that's even the wrong name you're including there." But these reviewers have been diminished in importance, the work is so little respected. If you're reviewed by a real critic, by James Wood or Louis Menand, then you get something that is informed, interesting, and highly articulate. But the average review doesn't have that kind of depth anymore.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

I am not blind to the shortcomings of our own people.

I have read your book and have come to help. [

I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

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

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.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

Wise criticism always begins with self-criticism.

I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").

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.

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.