Literary Critic Quotes

“Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.”

“What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.”

“It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.”

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”

“There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.”

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

“There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.”

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

“By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.”

“My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.”

“You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.”

“What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.”

“Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.”

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

“All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.”

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.”

“There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.”

“If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.”

“When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.”

“Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.”

“Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.”

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

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

“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.”

“The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.”