Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.

Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to bo…

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism tha…

It is a fallacy to think that carping is the strongest form of criticism: the important work begins after the artist's mistakes have been pointed out, and the …

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal, - that is they have ceased…

I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing…