#era

The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense. ↗

— Kenneth McLeish

#literary-criticism

If you tell me bad things about someone, you're telling bad things about me behind me ↗

— Miguel Ángel Sáez Gutiérrez

#literature #society #literary-criticism

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability. ↗

— Martin Amis

#don-quixote #literary-criticism #miguel-de-cervantes #literary-criticism

The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#literary-theory #literary-criticism

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms. ↗

— Irwin Shaw

#new-york-city #literary-criticism

Literature is news which stays news. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#poetry #literary-criticism

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent. ↗

— Nelson Algren

#criticism #critics #literature #writing #literary-criticism

The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#literary-criticism

In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#literary-criticism

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature--poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve. ↗

— Henry Seidel Canby

#literature #middle-class #middlebrows #diet