Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.
A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.
A critic who uses new quotations is making important changes.
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.
Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind.
What on earth is modern exegesis up to? Oh, little lazy one! Some red wine and up! Off you go, brandishing your fork, stripped of Ophelia's useless ornaments, fire in your large nostrils, out to rake the muck of metaphors.
Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.
Actually learning ancient Greek was a brilliant practice of mine because you'd sit there and you'd read a sentence and sometimes it would take you a day, an entire day to figure out one sentence. But it really trains you to be analytical, to think in a certain way to try and interpret what something means. So I've been thinking like that my whole life and then I love Machiavelli and I love thinking about politics that way. So it's sort of all that put together and then the good luck to meet a man who is sort of interested in the same thing.
I teach literature. That's easy for me. Take someone else's work and talk about it.
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.
It is easier to analyze a work in its form, in its evolution, than simply to love it with all the living forces of our heart. It is easier to define its peculiarities and its details than to draw out of it its emotion, its thought.
There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.
every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.
We must be on our guard against giving interpretations which are hazardous or opposed to science, and so exposing the word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.
No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
Was Mann himself fully aware of all the facets of his irony? Probably not - any more than Shakespeare was fully aware of all the riches subsequent critics have found in his plays.
Critics have a job to do. I understand that. It's not just to criticize. They're trying to interpret art for the public.
All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez's novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.
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.
I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.
Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.
Literary critics make natural detectives.
The Icesave matter is complex and it is understandable that the issue has been oversimplified by many. Unfortunately some of the basic facts of the matter have been unilaterally interpreted, and sometimes distorted, giving rise to unjustified criticism of the conduct of the Icelandic authorities.
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.
The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.
