Quotes by Literary Critics

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. (Virginia Woolf, p. 11)
Hermione Lee
Social class. Class remains our national awkward topic, usually mumbled over in academic diversity workshops; indeed, most people don't know how to talk about class without automatically coupling it with race. That's because we Americans are loath to recognize that the sky's-the-limit potential we take as our birthright comes at a price far beyond what many Americans--of any race--can afford to pay.
Maureen Corrigan
It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.
Donald Hall
The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts and we grow happier as we grow older.
William Lyon Phelps
Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly
He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.
Irving Howe
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.
Northrop Frye
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
Northrop Frye
Whenever it is possible a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money.
William Lyon Phelps
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.
Northrop Frye
In the sex-war thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said we have still to admit with Byron that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty deceit and revenge is set alight it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.
Cyril Connolly
People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Rebecca West
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
Northrop Frye
Poems are made by fools like me But only God can make a tree.
Joyce Kilmer
The bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.
Northrop Frye
Envy and fear are the only passions to which no pleasure is attached.
John Churton Collins
There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire.
John Churton Collins
Unhurt people are not much good in the world.
Enid Starkie
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
Cyril Connolly
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self.
Cyril Connolly
Speaking of Ted Turner The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
Charles Du Bos
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires.
Rebecca West
A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion for the instinctual tribes must be satisfied.
Cyril Connolly
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
Can it be that man is essentially a being who loves to conquer difficulties a creature whose function is to solve problems?
Gorham Munson
The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.
William Lyon Phelps
This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.
William Lyon Phelps
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.
Cyril Connolly
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we learn to walk.
Cyril Connolly
Carelessness is not fatal to journalism nor are cliches for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once a journalist has to accept the fact that his work by its very todayness is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
Cyril Connolly
A writer who takes up journalism abandons the slow tempo of literature for a faster one and the change will do him harm. By degrees the flippancy of journalism will become a habit and the pleasure of being paid on the nail and more especially of being praised on the nail grow indispensable.
Cyril Connolly
A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion for the instinctual tribes must be satisfied.
Cyril Connolly
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
Can it be that man is essentially a being who loves to conquer difficulties a creature whose function is to solve problems?
Gorham Munson
The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.
William Lyon Phelps
This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.
William Lyon Phelps
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.
Cyril Connolly
Envy and fear are the only passions to which no pleasure is attached.
John Churton Collins
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we learn to walk.
Cyril Connolly
Carelessness is not fatal to journalism nor are cliches for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once a journalist has to accept the fact that his work by its very todayness is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
Cyril Connolly
A writer who takes up journalism abandons the slow tempo of literature for a faster one and the change will do him harm. By degrees the flippancy of journalism will become a habit and the pleasure of being paid on the nail and more especially of being praised on the nail grow indispensable.
Cyril Connolly
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
Lionel Trilling
The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
Northrop Frye
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.
Cyril Connolly
The great humorist forgets himself in his delighted contemplation of other people.
Douglas Bush
The race of man while sheep in credulity are wolves for conformity.
Carl Van Doren
The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
Friedrich von Schlegel
Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
Van Wyck Brooks
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap it consoles it distracts it excites it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate it a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
Cyril Connolly
If happiness truly consisted in physical ease and freedom from care then the happiest individual... would be I think an American cow.
William Lyon Phelps
Why is it that so many people are afraid to admit that they are happy?
William Lyon Phelps
The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.
William Lyon Phelps
Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
Cyril Connolly
The secret of happiness ... is to be in harmony with existence to be always calm always lucid always willing "to be joined to the universe without being more conscious of it than an idiot " to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
Cyril Connolly