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Literature Quotes
"Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England."
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"The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics."
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"The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness."
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"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."
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"Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
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"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
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"I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal."
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"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste."
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"The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape."
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"My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own."
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"I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great."
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"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
"All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand."
"I often like to enjoy the beauty of a beautiful book."
"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."
"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
"Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?"
"Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony."
"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation."
"Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American."
"But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy."
"Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present."
"I read to know the past, I write to express my love for the future."
"Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about."
"Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate."
"That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer."
"In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other."
"I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets."
"If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble."
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince."
"And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature."
"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."
"All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one."
"The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander."
"Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle."
"I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis."
"First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him."
"In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75."
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