Quotes About Literature

It is not the business of a man of letters to take his politics either from a Monarch or a Mob, or to push his fortunes—slightly to alter a celebrated phrase—by those services which demagogues render to crowds.

If the love and pursuit of literature do not make a man more independent in character, more disinterested in his reasonings, more elevated in his views, they will not have done for him what I should have expected from them.

What real man of letters that ever ventured into the arid and somewhat vulgar domain of Party-politics has not felt the same feeling of revulsion, the same longing for the water-brooks?

In Shakespeare, as we might have expected, the masculine note and the feminine note are heard in perfect harmony.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

No first-rate poet ever went mad, or ever committed suicide, though one or two, no doubt, have happened to die comparatively young.

Some of the finest poetry ever written upon life is to be found surely in the Old Testament.

There have been seasons in the history of the human race, melancholy seasons for the human mind, the "evil days" spoken of by Milton, when men of letters could not, with any self-respect, mix in politics. How much more highly we should think of Seneca if that literary Stoic had not been a minister of Nero.

It is for the best and highest interests of literature that those who love it before all other things, and cherish it beyond all other considerations, should nevertheless take a large and liberal view of what constitutes life.

If this be poetry, then poetry is very easily written, and what has hitherto been supposed to be the highest, the most difficult, and the rarest, of the arts, presents no more difficulty to the person who knows how to write at all than the simplest, baldest, and most unartistic prose.

But if poetry is now comparatively little read, no one can deny that it is much written about.

Shakespeare was compounded of too many and too large elements to have been a poet only.

Now the highest literature—and Poetry is confessedly the highest literature—is a transfiguring reflex of life; and in its magic mirror we perforce see reflected all the thoughts, feelings, interests, passions, and events of human existence.

That politicians pure and simple are becoming less imbued with the literary spirit is, I think, certain, and it is to be regretted, because polite Politics are almost as much to be desired as polite Literature.

Would not the proper conclusion, therefore—a conclusion not overstrained and if not stated with excessive dogmatism—seem to be, that literature, though demanding precedence in the affections, and exacting the chief attention of one who professes really to love it, is not a jealous mistress, but, on the contrary, is only too well pleased to see even its most attached votaries combine with their one supreme passion a number of minor interests and even minor affections.

There is no passion of the human heart, no speculation of the human mind, to which Shakespeare has not, in some passage or another, given expressive utterance.

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives

There's something called the 'Washington Read,' which is the habit of many locals to go into a bookstore, pull a book off the shelf, rifle through the index to see if they're in there.

I've never really read any books about Washington, neither the politics nor the city.

I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they're so good. He doesn't waste any words.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

When I was in Marine training I memorised 'The Waste Land,' which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function.

That's what people expect: They don't want to read a slight novel. People don't want to waste their time on anything less than 'great.'

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.