Quotes About Literature

Most agents and editors, if they are speaking off the cuff, will admit that literary writing is defined as the kind that does not sell. The finalists for the National Book Award each year routinely sell between 2000 ? 5000 copies, and that's it.

Her reading left Keller increasingly disappointed by the way that biographers had deified Shakespeare

By assuming that Shakespeare had to have experienced something to write about it with such accuracy and force, Malone also, unwittingly, allowed for the opposite to be true: expertise in the self-revealing works that the scant biographical record couldn't support–his knowledge of falconry for example, or of seamanship, foreign lands or the ways that the ruling class behaved–should disqualify Shakespeare as the author of the plays.

Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

Until Malone had established a working chronology of Shakespeare's plays, no critic or biographer had ever thought to interpret Shakespeare's works through events in his life.

What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

The unprofitable game of profiling what could or couldn't be true of Shakespeare's character, based on what his characters said or did, had begun.

With Malone's decision to parse the plays for evidence of what an author thought or felt, literary biography had crossed a Rubicon.

Malone's biographical note to 'Sonnet 93' thus introduced yet another centrepiece of modern Shakespearean biography: the tendency to confuse the biographical with the autobiographical, as writers projected onto a largely blank Shakespearean slate their own personalities and preoccupations.

Underlying his reasoning here was the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier, a countess and so on.

Shakespeare had no Boswell–but neither did Marlowe, Jonson, Webster or any other contemporary dramatist.

In his own day, and for over a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare's works as autobiographical.

Shakespeare's sonnets give us no access to his personal history.

Over-identification on the part of Shakespeare's biographers had mutated into an over-identification on the part of his readers.

what started with the Sonnets migrated to the plays, though the claim that Shakespeare was speaking for himself through his dramatic characters was more difficult to sustain.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti.

It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.

The language of Homer lay still further off. Imagine a twenty-first-century Texan reading Chaucer.

There are days when books are the only bread for those who hunger

Shakespeare = We all make his

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men. Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love said Darcy. Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.

Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.