Literary Critic Quotes

“A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.”

“But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.”

“The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.”

“Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.”

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

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

“Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.”

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

“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.”

“There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.”

“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.”

“The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.”

“It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.”

“I'm a dull person.”

“The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.”

“My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.”

“Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.”

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”

“The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.”

“Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.”

“Women are an alien race set down among us.”

“All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.”

“We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.”

“Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.”

“Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.”