George Steiner Quotes

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.

I don’t mind citing a bad author if the line is good.

One may quote till one compiles.

I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.

My master's degree was in English literature.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

I did my dissertation on Kafka.

Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.

In the course of my research, I've read a lot of incredibly bad books - mostly by academics. I'm puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.