Critic Quotes

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.
If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.
The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.
The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.
We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.
Age is not different from earlier life as long as you're sitting down.
Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens.
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