Literary Critic Quotes

“I think books should have secrets, like people do.”

“There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.”

“Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”

“How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.”

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

“What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty, but it is their putting nerves that go, not their swings. For a duffer like [me], the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fiarways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees.”

“To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.”

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

“Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.”

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

“Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.”

“It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.”

“An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.”

“Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.”

“I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.”

“I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.”

“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.”

“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”

“You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.”

“The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.”

“What we need is progress with an escape hatch.”

“Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.”

“I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.”

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”

“Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.”