Quotes from Steven Moore

And after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, we have few examples of any literary activity except by religious writers (who, like cockroaches, seem capable of surviving any catastrophe).

Like all apocalyptic writers, the author despises people in general and fantasizes about the destruction of everyone different from him and his chosen group.

The difference between mainstream fiction and literature is what their writers do with words; the former places its emphasis on the story rather than the language used to tell that story; in literature, the language is the story; that is, the story is primarily a vehicle for a linguistic display of the writer's rhetorical abilities.

Can't recognize the organization of a novel? Assume there isn't one. Baffled by arcana — i.e., stuff you don't already know? Call the author pretentious. Find a book hard-going? Assume the author is deliberately torturing you.

It's both an alternative history of the novel and a history of the alternative novel.

While it would be too reductive (but not wrong) to say Cervantes equates knight-errantry with religious belief, he does seem to insinuate a syllogism that goes: Chivalric novels are false; the Bible resembles those novels; therefore, the Bible is false. But Cervantes gleefully complicates matters by insisting repeatedly that Don Quixote is true, which he and everyone who reads it knows is untrue.

Reading Marguerite Young's 1,200-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was like slipping into a luxurious opium dream.

and any discussion of art vs. entertainment in the present cultural climate invites accusations of elitism and snobbery.

When I first opened this book and saw all those scholarly footnotes, my heart leapt up as though I saw a host of golden daffodils.

Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.

the art critic Crémer reminds Wyatt of Degas's remark "that the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed

I envy Christ, he had a disease named after him

For some of us, there are few terms that induce narcosis quicker than "Christian allegory.

Finally, while I don't want to disparage the traditional novel--I still prefer Dickens's Great Expectations over Kathy Acker's Great Expectations, though I'll take Lauren Fairbanks's Sister Carrie over Dreiser's any day--there's a whole other world of novels out there most people never even hear of, much less read. Let's go see.

Marcus de Obregón is appealing and, yes, instructive, but is not entirely successful because the author often forgot he was writing a novel, not his memoirs.

I had to keep checking the copyright page to remind myself this novel [Karl Moritz's Anton Reiser ] was published in 1785, not 1985.

So: an epic novel of the Tathagata? Yes, but not a very good one. Kerouac would have done better.

If a third of the stories in the Decameron mock religion, two-thirds celebrate sex.

Aretino was a satirist on the noble if futile quest to reform his corrupt society by shoving its face in its worse excesses. (Futile because has any society ever reformed itself after being shown the error of its ways by a satirist? anywhere? ever?)

Nearly all of the stories [in The Heptameron ] are about the sexual relations between men and women, with a large percentage dealing with the unromanic side: with rape, infidelity, the seduction of nuns and wives by monks (everyone in the Renaissance seems to have despised monks), loveless marriages, incest, and borderline necrophilia.

Our lives will be a wealth of expectation and consummation," says one character eagerly, and conspicuous consumption and concupiscent consummation intertwine in a heady celebration of the material world.

Novelists always set up obstacles for lovers to overcome to make their eventual union all the more sastisfying, but Gomberville portrays love as a long, tedious ocean voyage to someplace miserable.

Sorel's novels deserve to be revived, but Polexander can be left in its watery grave.

4. You've had enough of the big city and decide to return home. Waiting for a bus, you pick up a discarded copy of Larva and, because you have a long bus-ride ahead of you, begin reading. You quickly discover it is not a conventional novel. Do you: (a) discard it and stare out the window all the way back home? (b)