More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader and would no more read a book alone if they could help it than have a baby alone.
Some people insist that 'mediocre' is better than 'best.' They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none.
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Robert A. Heinlein
I started this dirty quote business when I noticed that I only tend to read authors when their quotes convince me of wit and style. In a world overflowing with bad literature and corrupted product-placement critics the only weapon one has is either word of...
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Martijn Benders
I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting...
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Stephen King
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]
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John Osborne
Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.
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Jeffrey Robinson
More Quotes By Randall Jarrell
I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness–that the darkness flung me– Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me...
It's ugly, but is it art?
When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I'd wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting groceries in my car See me.
