Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.
Writers don’t seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
To bring anything really to life in literature we can’t be lifelike: we have to be literature-like.
One doesn’t bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There’s no adventure of the mind.
No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.
A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he’ll start by imitating whatever he’s read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
The motive for metaphor... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.
It is impossible to think of an ideal human life except as an alternation of individual and social life, as equally a belonging and an escape.
Mythological thinking cannot be superseded, because it forms the framework and context for all thinking.
The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it recreates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.
The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves. In Shakespeare we can still have heroes who can see ghosts and talk in magnificent poetry, but by the time we get to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot they’re speaking prose and have turned into ghosts themselves.
A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.
Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.
The purest human act, and a model for all human acts, is an informative, creative act which transforms a world that is merely objective, set against us, in which we feel lonely and frightened and unwanted, into a home.
The upper class made their names for the lower classes – villain, knave, varlet, boor – into terms of contempt because the people they described had to wriggle through life as best they could: their first and almost their only rule was survival. The deadliest insult one gentleman could give another then was to call him a liar, not because the one being insulted had a passion for truth, but because it was being suggested that he couldn’t afford to tell the truth.
Honest critics are continually finding blind spots in their taste: they discover the possibility of recognizing a valid form of poetic experience without being able to realize it for themselves.
If Shakespeare were alive now, no doubt he’d be interviewed every week and his opinions canvassed on every subject from national foreign policy to the social effects of punk rock. But in his day nobody cared what Shakespeare’s views were about anything, and he wouldn’t have been allowed to discuss public affairs publicly. He wasn’t, therefore, under a constant pressure to become opinionated.
Literature’s world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas; the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments.
People don’t get into planes because they want to fly, they get into planes because they want to get somewhere else faster. What’s produced the aeroplane is not so much a desire to fly as a rebellion against the tyranny of time and space.