Terry Eagleton Quotes

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

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 liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

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.

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

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'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.

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

My mother, with a Master's in English Literature, taught me to appreciate language and that words matter.

A book makes claims of literary art.

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

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

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.

The world of literature is so rich and so enriching. The value is inestimable of what reading does for you.

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.

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

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

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

Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.