Critics From The United Kingdom

"It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer."

"By the second half of the century the percipient few in the universities had come to realize that not all was well. If...the universities were to be places of high scholarship, then the reforms of the first half of the century were found wanting, or at any rate insufficient and wrongly conceived. A different kind of change was therefore required, and there could be none, unless critical scholarship was reinstated. It was an important feature of that change that Bentley arrived back in this country together, as it were, with the great Germans who had made themselves his disciples."

"The fortuitous or casual concourse of atoms."

"It is a maxim with me that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself."

"“Whatever is, is not,” is the maxim of the anarchist, as often as anything comes across him in the shape of a law which he happens not to like."

"The greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred; a man so great that in his own province he serves for a touchstone of merit and has always been admired by all admirable scholars and despised by all despicable scholars: Richard Bentley."

"Bentley had lived with the ancients till he understood them as no one will ever understand them who brings to their study a taste formed on the poetry of Elizabeth's time or ours."

"Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse."

"The one kind of society that the Church cannot adjust to is no society at all, i.e., a setup where community has become so fragmented that a communal religion is a fiction, sustained only by talk and make-news items in the press and television."

"The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five."

"Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English departments."

"Off she'd go to the hospital, a place I believe she secretly liked because they treat you like a child there."

"A deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism."

"Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot."

"It is a fallacy to think that carping is the strongest form of criticism: the important work begins after the artist's mistakes have been pointed out, and the reviewer can't put it off indefinitely with sneers, although some neophytes might be tempted to try: "When in doubt, stick out your tongue" is a safe rule that never cost one any readers. But there's nothing strong about it, and it has nothing to do with the real business of criticism, which is to do justice to the best work of one's time, so that nothing gets lost."

"Chicago 1968 taught one how close any civilized country is to berserkness at all times; also how terrorism, even silly terrorism, strengthens the cops more than anyone. Yet already this European-style history lesson has been watered down by consensus into something crazy we did in the sixties, just as we "did" McCarthyism in the fifties. As if a nation changes its nature completely every ten years; as if social forces were as evanescent as hula hoops or skateboards, instead of as remorseless as glaciers."

"As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place."

"This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man."

"As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window."

"He was truly after an art in which the creator could be as intelligent as he liked, but in which intelligence must be transmuted entirely into form, so that no lumps of thinking are left showing."

"Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America."

"The 1930s — a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way."

"Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy."

"Childhood lays itself out, like a novel, he suggests, complete with central observer, fixed characters, and linear plot. Later, life disperses itself into anecdotes. At twenty-one, it no longer strictly matters whether the author went first to Ireland and then to Spain, or Spain first. And after thirty, he could stitch the pages in backward for all we care."

"It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved."

"As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives."

"How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late."

"His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation."

"That is the best story he could find in his life, never mind if it's the truest: an artist's duty is always to tell the best story."

"The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion."

"Happy the man with a book-length grievance — and rare. Each of these books contains one possible magazine article surrounded by more padding than an offensive lineman: every little indignity that ever happened to them, and every two-bit feud, magnified to a Horrible Example to justify a larger printing."

"The odds on any intelligent person having an unhappy childhood are better than fair, and the odds on a sad ending are practically off the board."

"The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them."

"Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves — all plot and no characters, or made-up characters — Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session."

"It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point."

"Both of them were artists with highly developed personas, and hence unreliable witnesses to their own pasts."

"I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" — as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns."

"For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones; since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival."

"Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing)."

"The rational man may talk a good game about suicide, but reason must give way to obsession and finally squalor before he can actually do it."

"In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him."

"Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy — but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery."

"Professor Bell, in his tortured efforts to sound fair and impersonal, arrives at an aesthetic principle too edifying for Art to bear. He says in effect that you can explore evil, drawing "on the tap roots of the demonic," but you may not approve it. But when you draw on those tap roots, who knows what you will find? Writers just back from their season in hell are likely to be covered in goat blood and tend to rave. The moralists can sort out the evidence later. But the writer with the correct attitude could not have entered hell in the first place."

"The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries."

"Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations — that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling."

"What he feared most was the blind spot between us and the future, the space between identities where we could get lost forever."

"It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics."

"Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test."

"Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind."

"A Broadway play is so much an event, designed down to the bit parts to explode in your face on one particular night, that it is hard to judge any one of them fairly from the scrawny instructions known as a script."