A Quote by A. S. Byatt

Literary critics make natural detectives.

A. S. Byatt

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Critics Detectives Literary Make Natural

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A. S. Byatt
English - Novelist
Born: August 24, 1936

The most successful detectives owe their success to noticing small signs. Scouts are natural detectives and never let the smallest detail escape them. These small things are called by Scouts 'Sign.'

Robert Baden-Powell

The criminal is a creative artist; detectives are just critics.

Hannu Rajaniemi

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

Robertson Davies

Poetry is often very critical of the culture from which it emerges. Quite often literary critics of a nationalist bent talk up the national culture, in a way that the literary texts don't. Poetry can bring out areas of denial and repression.

Edna Longley

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

Maya Angelou

I love people, studying people. That's the Scorpio part of me. We are natural detectives; we like to find things out.

James Van Praagh

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

Will Self

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

Nelson Algren

Detectives are only human; we're not Gods that know everything. When detectives tell their theory, in reality, most are rather anxious. Thinking that there's always possibility that they could have missed something, somewhere... But in return, the excitement you experience when your theory's smack bang correct is twice as great!

Gosho Aoyama

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

Edward Abbey

Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'

Mel Brooks

I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

Mark Kurlansky

Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest!

Arthur Conan Doyle

I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.

Salman Rushdie

There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling.

George Lucas

A Quote by A. S. Byatt

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