A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer.
When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
Sometimes literary critics review the book they wanted you to write, not the book you wrote, and that's very irksome.
A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from the circumstances of their creation, and even apart from the intentions of their creator.
Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all.