He doesn't know what he means, and doesn't know he doesn't know. - F. R. Leavis

Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.

It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

A good deal of Paradise Lost strikes one as being almost as mechanical as bricklaying.