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Literary Critic Inspirational Quotes (30053)

Page 50 of 1253
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Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .
Vladimir Nabokov
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The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
T. S. Eliot
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It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
Vladimir Nabokov
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If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?
Margaret Atwood
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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
Vladimir Nabokov
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change.
James Russell Lowell
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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
Vladimir Nabokov
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My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir.
Vladimir Nabokov
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How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
Vladimir Nabokov
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Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
Vladimir Nabokov
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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
Vladimir Nabokov
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My Carmen, I said (I used to call her that sometimes) we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed. ... Because, really, I continued, there is no point in staying here. There is no point in staying anywhere, said Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Our universities should produce good criticism they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
Randall Jarrell
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I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.
Howard Rheingold
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There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
Leslie Fiedler
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True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of man. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle.
Hugh Blair
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Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
Virginia Woolf
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