A guest sees more in an hour than the host in a year.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.
Constant, indiscriminate approval devalues because it is so predictable.
Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.
Don't judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.
Henry James chews more than he bites off.
I don't want to see the uncut version of anything.
It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that, to break a man's spirit is devil's work.
The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.
Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.
He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.
More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.
It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
His words leap across rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.
To many people dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.
