Quotes About Literature

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.

I have almost never been compared to male writers in any review. All women.

Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.

It is difficult to get men to pick up a female author. Women will read men, but men won't read women.

The greater part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to man.

Some of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition, but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and told the stories from the other point of view.

People like [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor], whether young people, young women, even critics - male critics - they were not shocked by it. Of course, some parts were cut.

You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.

The only parts I like out of any of those women books is the dirty parts. But I don't think their dirty parts are any good, really.

Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit.

I grew up with 'Jane Eyre,' reading it at school, and it's one of those, I think, for a lot of women, a lot of girls, it's the iconic story and so many girls relate to Jane Eyre and her character.

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

It's also interesting to notice that most of the best Finnish speculative writers are women.

We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.

James Patterson has a way with female characters. He understands women in a way that a lot of male writers don't.

I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.

The category "Women Poets" is bizarre and irrelevant. It's a subcategory of Poets, but there is not a "Men Poets" category.

Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.

Books make dangerous devils out of women.

I have met with women who I really think would like to be married to a poem and to be given away by a novel.

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.