A Quote by Edward Abbey

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

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American Because Cannot Cold Cold War Conventional Critic Critics Even Example Fearless For Example Forgive Good Good Taste Greatest Him Income Income Tax Introduction Judge Lapses Literary Lived More Our Piece Radical Scandalous See Society Taste Than Those War Wilson

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Edward Abbey
American - Author
January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989

The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.

Edward Albee

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

Clive James

A critic may reject some miracle stories as legendary, and not others, with no inconsistency at all for the simple reason that even if one holds miracles to be possible, one need not hold legends to be impossible! There are other factors, literary and historiographical ones, that might lead a critic to conclude that even though miracles can happen, it does not appear that in this or that case they did.

Robert M. Price

All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff.

C. S. Lewis

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

D. H. Lawrence

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

John Grisham

Most of my professional work has been in these areas - as a historical critic, as a literary critic. I've done very little in the history of interpretation [as Elie Wiesel has]. I've been interested in it, but I have not contributed to that field, really.

Hershel Shanks

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

Edward Abbey

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

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

Your enemies love your failures, sure. But what they love even more is to see you brought so low by those failures that you never get up again. Sometimes enemies aren't even external. Often, our biggest critic, our greatest enemy, is ourselves.

Kameron Hurley

No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

Oscar Wilde

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

Whitney Balliett

The only just literary critic," he concluded, "is Christ, who admires more than does any man the gifts He Himself has bestowed.

J. R. R. Tolkien

A Literary Society is the most proper form for the introduction of our Order into any state where we are yet strangers.

Adam Weishaupt

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

A Quote by Edward Abbey

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