Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton
Terence Francis "Terry" Eagleton FBA is a prominent British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth22 February 1943
Terry Eagleton quotes about
brave finest adventurous
Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.
cat night black
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
life-is human-life humans
Nothing in human life is inherently private.
silly frustration self
It is silly to call fat people ''gravitationally challenged'' - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
spring desire strive
All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.
needs stuff too-much
If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.
logic inevitable internals
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
racism today nostalgia
Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
reading space enabling
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
ivory-tower culture towers
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
responsibility media life-is
In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.
waiting language
Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.
long actors lines
You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
literature language speak
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.