Quotes About Literature

Especially after I read Pete DeVries recent scintillant "Afternoon of a Faun." There are ways and ways to have a love affair. Above all, one must not be serious about it.

got depressed with the ending on Tuesday: four pages of anti-climactic question and answer between Doctor and Sara, dry and chopped logical as an adding machine: now, you've decided this, how do you feel about that. Bad as a rich involved poem with a bare flat two-line moral tacked on the end: this is the truth kiddies

shall pick up Bergson, or Kafka, or Joyce, and languish for the minds that are outleaping and outskipping mine.

whole emphasis has swung again, to a realization that if I enter this academic, critical world, I'll spend all my time reading and reading, and that I need a healthy overturning of the apple-cart, almost a refusal to read beyond a point, and to read more of what influences my writing, rather

I would spend my whole time writing on some obscure theme in the works of James Joyce.

Czytanie ksi??ek to najpi?kniejsza zabawa, jak? sobie ludzko?? wymy?li?a.

Every writer owes something to Holmes. -- T.S. Eliot, in The Criterion, 1929

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

It [The Great Gatsby] has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years....it seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

If Hell is where nothing connects, then being in the field of English must be the key to heaven's door! We are in the business of finding connections--within texts, between texts and contexts, between texts and ourselves, between our readings and the readings of other interpreters.

We must remember that what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do. It may be only what people are capable of having done to them.

Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

It is just the literature that we read for 'amusement' or 'purely for pleasure' that may have the greatest, least suspected, earliest influence on us.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing one's own, regardless of what other people think of the book 2) to a certain extent, because it is something one 'ought to have read' but one must be quite clear this why one is reading.

Most editors are failed writers. But so are most writers

About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.

In the next revolution of taste it is possible that poets may turn to the study of Dryden. He remains one of those who have set standards for English verse which it is desperate to ignore.