Quotes About Literature

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be "This book is worthless", while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would probably be "This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is good. Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is bad. Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Jack London)"He was an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been . . . the excellence of his short stories has been almost forgotten.

When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.

Ist ihnen schon mal der Gedanke gekommen', sagte er, 'daß die ganze Entwicklung der englischen Dichtkunst dadurch beeinflußt wurde, dass die englische Sprache nicht genug Reime aufweist?' Nein, dieser Gedanke war Winston wirklich noch nie in den Sinn gekommen. Auch erschien er ihm unter den waltenden Umständen weder sonderlich wichtig noch interessant.

If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad

There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.

The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions

And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened -if, indeed, it did happen.

If one has once read Shakespeare with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting him, because there are not many subjects of major importance that he does not discuss or at least mention somewhere or another, in his unsystematic but illuminating way.

Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.

Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop

Rudyard Kipling was the only popular writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer.

Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else—that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.

The best brothel-scenes in literature have been written, without exception, by pious believers or pious unbelievers.

This edition is based on Orwell's typescript of November 1948, amended according to his proof corrections and taking in a few readings that are deemed to be his from the American first edition.

Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it.

If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.

If I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens , I should say that Tolstoy's appeal will probably be wider in the long run, because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the English-speaking culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people, which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's characters can cross a frontier, Dickens's can be portrayed on a cigarette-card. But one is no more obliged to choose between them than between a sausage and a rose.

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?' No

Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like "I wander through each charter'd street" than in three-quarters of Socialist literature.

Winston woke up with the word Shakespeare on his lips.