A Quote by John Updike

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

John Updike

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Authors Become Criticism Failure Kind Literature Paleontology Psychoanalysis Study Supercilious

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John Updike
American - Novelist
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.

Erich Fromm

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

Umberto Eco

I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.

Adam Rapp

A problem with school is that you often become what you study. If you study, let say cooking, you become a chef. If you study law, you become an attorney, and a study of auto mechanics makes you mechanics. The mistake in becoming what you study is that, too many people forget to mind their own business. They spend their lives minding someone else's business and making that person rich

Robert Kiyosaki

There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly.

Elif Batuman

All along, I've been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that.

Judith Viorst

Are my characters copies of people in real life? ... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done.

Ayn Rand

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.

Vladimir Lenin

What the purpose of my life is about is I want to become the kind of person that God wants me to become, and through my study of the scriptures I can articulate the kind of person that God would be happy if I become.

Clayton M. Christensen

Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism.

Mason Cooley

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?

Gao Xingjian

Theology is a non-subject. I'm not saying that professors of theology are non-professors. They do interesting things, like study biblical history, biblical literature. But theology, the study of gods, the study of what gods do, presupposes that gods exist. The only kind of theology that I take account of are those theological arguments that actually argue for the existence of God.

Richard Dawkins

South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.

J. M. Coetzee

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

Robert Hass

Human paleontology shares a peculiar trait with such disparate subjects as theology and extraterrestrial biology: it contains more practitioners than objects for study.

David Pilbeam

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

Marilyn Hacker

A Quote by John Updike

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