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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #criticism
Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so ↗
Whether he chooses a 'scholarly' or a 'popular' edition the modern reader is likely to have his judgement influenced in advance. Almost invariably he will be offered an assisted passage. Footnotes, Forewords, Afterwords serve notice that a given text is intellectually taxing—that he is likely to need help. Such apparatus is likely to be a positive disincentive to casual reading. But a cheaper edition may offer interference of another kind. Reminders, in words or pictures, of Julie Christie's Bathsheba Everdene or Michael York's Pip can perhaps create a beguiling sense of accessibility. But they may also pre-empt the imaginative responses of the reader. ↗
Novels, says Sartre, are not life, but they owe our power upon us, as upon himself as an infant, to the fact that they are somehow like life. In life, he once remarked, 'all ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic.' The as if of the novel consists in a similar negation of determinism, the establishment of an accepted freedom by magic. We make up aventures, invent and ascribe the significance of temporal concords to those 'privileged moments' to which we alone award their prestige, make our own human clocks tick in a clockless world. And we take a man who is by definition de trop, and create a context in which he isn't. The novel is a lie only as our quotidian inventions are lies. The power which goes to its making--the imagination --is a function of man's inescapable freedom. This freedom, in Mary Warnock's words, 'expresses itself in his ability to see things which are not.' It is by his fiction that we know he is free. It is not surprising that Sartre as ontologist, having to describe many kinds of fictive behaviour, invents stories to do so, thus moving into a middle ground between life and novel. .... ↗
The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent. ↗
I have learned to be kinder to myself, to imagine that I am my own best friend, whispering comforting words in my ear and drowning out the voices of Self-Doubt and Self-Criticism. I have learned to acknowledge and appreciate the 98% that I have achieved instead of the 2% that I didn’t. ↗
Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off. ↗
Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93] ↗
Under a bad leadership Serbs are capable of committing the most terrible atrocities; under good leaders we can do great deeds. It's like a field - if it's not cared for, the weeds will take over. But if you tend it, water and feed the seeds, you will read a bountiful harvest. Serbs are lazy, we lack discipline and have no capacity for self-criticism." With Their Backs to the World ↗
