Quotes About Literature

I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima

Madame, it is always a mistake to know an author. (p.215)

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.

Let me tell you something. You won't mind, will you? Don't have scenes with your young ladies. Try not to. Because you can't have scenes without crying, and then you pity yourself so much you can't remember what the other person's said. You'll never be able to remember conversations that way. Just try and be calm. I know it's awfully hard. But remember, it's for literature. We all ought to make sacrifices for literature. Look at me. I'm going to England without a protest. All for literature.

Just two so far," Roger said. "My counselor and I." "My counselor and me," Johnny said. "How the hell do you write books?" "I can always hire someone to put in the grammar.

Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

Churchill drank twice what I did if you could believe the accounts and he had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was simply trying to step up my drinking to a reasonable amount when I might win the Prize myself; who knows?

Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

Non c'è nessun amico più leale di un libro.

It is a curious fact of literary history that a story which describes the loss of a gigantic prize provided the author with the greatest prize of his career. —

And tell me, who is the greatest writer in America? My husband, said my wife.

Show irony and pity.

We all ought to make sacrifices for literature.

Ein Klassiker ist ein Buch, das die Leute loben, aber nicht lesen.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

To hear him talk of it, you would never know how very good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have when they have done something very fine, and I hoped he would get the book quickly so that I might read it.

While I had been angry I had demoted him from Scott to Fitzgerald

it is always a mistake to know an author

For Whom the Bell Tolls was an immediate success. Hemingway wrote to his first wife, Hadley, that it was "selling like frozen daiquiris in hell."24 It has had tremendous impact and has been

Allow me to pay this small tribute to you who taught so much to those of us who wanted to be writers when we were young. I deplore the fact that you have not yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.