Best 10 quotes of Henry Seidel Canby on MyQuotes

Arrogance, pedantry, and dogmatism...the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young.

A short story is simplification to the highest degree

Flatulency today consists in saying simply in several different ways the same thing over and over again.

If the bell of intolerance tolls for one, it tolls for all.

Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.

The function of the Short Story is to be interesting, to convey vivid impressions, an therefore it must, to a degree, work with the evident and superficial thing

The London 'Academy' has seen fit recently to scoff at the critics who have been exercising themselves ove rthe so-called art of the Short Story... But the new Short Story has gained more individuality. It supports the magazines and has invaded the newspapers

The short story, its course plotted and its form proscribed, has become too efficient... but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature

While the novel-writer aims at an eminently natural method of transcription, the author of the short story adopts a very artificial one

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature--poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve.