Literary Critic Quotes

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

“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.”

“I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.”

“Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.”

“I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.”

“In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.”

“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.”

“Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”

“irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.”

“If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.”

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.”

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

“Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.”

“Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.”

“Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”

“All love comes from the family.”

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

“Humor is my default mode.”

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

“It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.”

“If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.”

“Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.”

“The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.”

“Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.”

“...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.”