Quotes About Literature

It is impossible to imitate Voltaire without being Voltaire.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond; and must be polished e'er he shines.

Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children; and life is the other way around.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

Literature is a power to be possessed, not a body of objects to be studied.

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

Contemporary literature can be classified under three headings: the neurotic, the erotic and the tommy-rotic.

Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

A writer who takes up journalism abandons the slow tempo of literature for a faster one and the change will do him harm. By degrees the flippancy of journalism will become a habit and the pleasure of being paid on the nail and more especially of being praised on the nail, grow indispensable.

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, Why should I? He never reads any of mine.

My favourite example (of ex-patriotism) is James Joyce, who left Ireland at nineteen and never came back. But he spent the rest of his life writing about Ireland from the perspective of living in Paris.

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.