Quotes About Literature

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

The originals are not original, but that Emersonian irony yield to the Emersonian pragmatism that the inventor knows how to borrow.

Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

How to read 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctually reach out for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the Internet.

All canonical writing possesses the quality of making you feel strangeness at home.

I cannot locate any aestetic dignity in [Stephen] King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he...Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

La escritura mala es toda igual; la buena escritura es de una diversidad escandalosa.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

I regard Clarissa and In Search of Lost Time as the two most eminent of all novels, surpassing even Tolstoy and Dickens.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards to the literary scene. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature.

BLOOM: As far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they're called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it. INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits? BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.

All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.