"Literary critic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and modesty: it never for an instant forgets that literature exists for the sake of life and not life for the sake of literature: it has no esoteric or professional affectations, but says plain things in plain words such as all can understand. The literary critic can have no more valuable qualities than these. But they do not complete his equipment. The criticism of Johnson has many limitations. He was entirely without aesthetic capacity. Not only were music and the plastic arts nothing to him—as indeed they have been ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... to demand style from those who live by it than from the authors of the weather reports in the newspapers. Often, one notices, when the golden youth, fresh from college and the reading of Shelley and Anatole France, commences literary critic, he begins damning the sensational novelists as though it were their business to write like Jane Austen. This is a mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to what pretends to be literature. That is why one is often impelled to attack really excellent ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... never, at any time and place, more than a few literary critics of genuine incision, taste, and instinct; and these qualities, rare enough in themselves, are further debilitated, in many cases, by excessive geniality or indigestion. The ideal literary critic should be guarded as carefully as a delicate thermal instrument at the Weather Bureau; his meals, friendships, underwear, and bank account should all be supervised by experts and advisedly maintained at a temperate ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... in years as the opposite lodger was Mr. Bixby, known to his few friends as a genial philosopher and poet, to the public as the literary critic of one of the great daily papers. He might have been thirty-five years of age, but, as he had lived more for others than for himself, as he had made a study and not a pleasure of life, his gray eyes and the other features of his face suggested to whoever met ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... AND ESPECIALLY IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION . . . " have been Baconians, or, at least, opposed to Will Shakspere's authorship. To these names of scholars I must add that of my late friend, Samuel Clemens, D.Litt. of Oxford; better known to many as Mark Twain. Dr. Clemens was, indeed, no mean literary critic; witness his epoch-making study of Prof. Dowden's Life of Shelley, while his researches into the biography of Jeanne d'Arc ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang |
