Literary Commentary Quotes

I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.

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

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn’t written for poets, it’s written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it’s true for oneself.

A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus.

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.

There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.

Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.

Terence, this is stupid stuff: You eat your victuals fast enough; There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear, To see the rate you drink your beer. But oh, good Lord, the verse you make, It gives a chap the belly-ache. The cow, the old cow, she is dead; It sleeps well the horned head: We poor lads, 'tis our turn now To hear such tunes as killed the cow. Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme Your friends to death before their time. Moping, melancholy mad: Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.

I teach literature. That's easy for me. Take someone else's work and talk about it.

I was not exploiting any real individual's story in writing ROOM, of course I was aware that my novel, by commenting on such situations, would run the risk of falling into those traps of voyeurism, sensationalism and sentimentality.

Old Marley was dead as a doornail... The wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.

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

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.

Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.

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.

A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.

I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.

Our culture already has a number of well known stories about artificial life and non-human intelligence. In 'Exegesis,' I've tried to not only tell a new and engaging story but also to comment on those well known stories through the details of my novel.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.