Theophile Gautier Quotes

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 have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.

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.

Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.

Well I tried to, but I could never write anything that I liked or was worthwhile. I threw it all out and realized that I had to make a serious study- that my tastes were far more advanced than my abilities.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

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

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

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.

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.