Literary Judgment Quotes

I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.

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

What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book.

Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

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

[Preface to second edition:] ... I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.

My dear Smollett ... disgraces his talent by writing those stupid romances called history.

I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature.

I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing.

Writers will be judged by what they write.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.