Literary Critic Quotes

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

Genius, whether locked up in a cell or roaming at large, is always solitary.

I'm a dull person.

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, and one's inner happiness.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

To forgive a fault in another is more sublime than to be faultless one's self.

Where there is no longer love, there is no longer anything.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

Celebrate within yourself that wonderful treasure . . . true kindness.

No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

a woman, when she is heroic, is not heroic by halves.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.

fretting at trouble only doubles it.

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.

The more you lose the right to be jealous, the more so you become!

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

Not to love is to cease to live.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.

One wastes so much time, one is so prodigal of life, at twenty! Our days of winter count for double. That is the compensation of the old.

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

Women are an alien race set down among us.

These tears do me good, they have watered the parched place; perhaps my heart will grow again there!

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

There is only one sex. A man and a woman are so entirely the same thing that one can scarcely understand the subtle reasons for sex distinctions with which our minds are filled.

I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.