George Steiner Quotes

You can't expect that, after a poor fellow has written a book, he should also understand it.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticising the works of others.

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

That complete statement which is literature.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

As by some might be saide of me: that here I have but gathered a nosegay of strange floures, and have put nothing of mine unto it, but the thred to binde them. Certes, I have given unto publike opinion, that these borrowed ornaments accompany me; but I meane not they should cover or hide me.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.

Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.