Quotes About Critique

Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante's scheme, Limbo is to Hell.

It's helpful to get feedback on your work, and I think you learn a lot from reading other people's work and giving them feedback.

Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.

I'm not a fan of self-help books - how can something be 'self-help' if the book itself is purportedly helping you?

I liked Hemingway better before I began to be called 'Hemingwayesque.'

I can't be part of what is being done in films these days and hence I don't do films anymore.

If I were American, I'd vote everything but Hillary Clinton.

I am hard put to think of a single positive thing that commercial Hindi cinema has achieved.

Isn't nearly every Hindi film a rehash of some movie or the other?

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

I have managed to make the Capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against Capitalism.

If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad

Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.

Rudyard Kipling was the only popular writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer.

Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else—that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.

Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it.

Mr. Upward italicises "at the present time" because he realises that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist.

Crusoe's religious preoccupations seemed boring and rather silly.

Satire is what closes on Saturday night

Probably someday some guy representing me will be in there, and some punk who I'm precursor of will be hooting at me, asking why my shoes were made out of dead cows and so forth? Because in that future time, wearing dead sking on your feet, no, they won't do that. That will seem to them like barbarity

I'd say there's a general thesis in here somewhere: any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another writer's work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story.

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian. Samuel Clemens Mark Twain, American author and humorist

Yes, darling, that is quite a nice frock, but the hankerchief is not only the wrong shade of grey, but quite damnably tied. Let me show you, my sweet.

Whether you chose a passive-aggressive husband, workaholic wife, or life of single motherhood, we are all officially allowed - and uniquely qualified - to critique our own life experience. Please don't pretend you're living mine.