Paul Auster Quotes

I've always been terribly uninterested in criticism. And one of the reasons, I just thought recently, is that you know there are various schools of criticism that will compete, and one will supercede the other.

Properly speaking, we learn from those books only that we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticise would have to learn from me.

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

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

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

For critics, as they are birds of prey, have ever a natural inclination to carrion.

I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.

Confusing the author and the character seems to be a popular and rather unsophisticated reaction to books.

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

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

I have no literary approach - except to literature.

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

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

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read.

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

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.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as "task" or "role" when they are attached to literature.

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative.

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.