Literary Critic Quotes

“The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.”

“I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.”

“To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.”

“I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.”

“Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?”

“A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.”

“Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.”

“I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.”

“The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.”

“There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.”

“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.”

“My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.”

“For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.”

“Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.”

“We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.”

“The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.”

“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 write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.”

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.”

“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.”

“John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.”

“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.”

“My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.”

“That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.”

“Our lives fade behind us before we die.”