#critic

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless. ↗

— Charles Bukowski

#humor #literature #humor

I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us. ↗

— David Farland

#critics #fantasy #writing #love

Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#gossip #hypocrites #judgement #low-self-esteem #gossip

People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need. ↗

— Gary Chapman

#criticism #love #need #romance #love

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#criticism #writing #writing-advice #writing-advice

History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness. ↗

— James Fenimore Cooper

#history #love

Too many critics mistake the deliberations of the Congress for its decisions. ↗

— Sam Rayburn

#critics #decisions #deliberations #many #mistake

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter , published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of Ulysses did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line 'Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter.' So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#george-orwell #influence #james-joyce #literary-criticism #literature

In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since. ↗

— Voltaire

#religion #religion

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children. ↗

— Bruce Sterling

#cyberpunk #future #science-fiction #change