Modern criticism has concerned itself more with poetry than with fiction for several reasons. First, fiction does not lend itself ...so readily as verse to the close analytical approach. Second, there is no body of critical theory upon the subject of fiction comparable to the poetic theory available to the critic of poetry. Third, the tremendous output of short fiction and novels tends to obscure the total picture and to make the initial problem of selection and evaluation extremely difficult. The result is that fiction, when it has been examined, has been subjected to the same criteria as those applied to verse; sometimes, as in the case of such authors as James, Joyce, or Kafka, with excellent results; at other times, with authors such as Tolstoi, Mann, or Hemingway, the results have either been bad or criticism has limited itself to discussion of the authors' lives, their social background, or their historical importance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn't talk about women, and with half their subject mat...ter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How else is the famous short story 'A study in Abjection' to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently... undermined by psychology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; And done, we straight repent us of the sport:... Let us not then rush blindly on unto it, Like lustfull beasts, that onely know to doe it:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amount... of hard work is too severe for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potential...ities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is our life? a play of passion; Our mirth the music of division;... Our mothers' wombs the tiring-houses be Where we are dressed for this short comedy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,... And speed glum heroes up the line to death,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think a surgeon is particularly suited by temperament to the short story form as opposed to the novel, because the short story i...s rather like a surgical operation. It has a beginning, middle, and an end--at least my stories all do: you make an incision, you rummage around inside for a little while, then you stitch it up. Writing a short story is like taking out an inflamed appendix.... The act of making an incision is the creation of a wound for the purpose of healing the patient. The earliest forms of writing were exactly that: taking up a sharp rock and gouging out hieroglyphics in a flat stone--making wounds, as it were, to tell a story. The difference, of course, is that the surgical wound must heal, eventually, but the writer's wound does not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »