“Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else—that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.”

“To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.”

“In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.”

“Literary critics make natural detectives.”

“Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on.”

“Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist’s literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy—it’s always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.”