Most critics, fond of subservient art still make the whole depend upon a part. They talk of principles, but notions prize And all to one loved folly sacrifice.
... the literary manifestation of the mind - body dichotomy that dominates today's culture: the split between the "serious" and the "entertaining" - the belief that if a literary work is "serious," it...
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Literature is pure artifice, but great literature manages to disguise it and mediocre literature betrays it.
This backward construction was an authorial slight of hand that Poe understood well. Pondering what he called tales of ratiocination - his own name for detective stories - Poe later remarked, People...
There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis - people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices. ... I...
He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He
Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you...
because white novelists are not white novelists but simply "novelists," and white characters are not white characters but simply "human," and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter...
To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory pipe dreams is right also.
A book can't be a half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the...
It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been...
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...