Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is t…

The last speech [Iago's soliloquy], the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity - how awful!

And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you, How oft! I bless the Lot, that made me love you.

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysi…

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better i…

I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde f…