Quotes About Literature

To judge therefore of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rule is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country who acted under those of another.

I'm strictly for Stevenson. I don't dig the intellectual bit, but I'm telling you, man, he knows the most.

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

But he who truly loves books loves all books alike, and not only this, but it grieves him that all other men do not share with him this noble passion. Verily, this is the most unselfish of loves!

As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.

My heroes are people like Philip Levine, who is simply like a god to me, as a writer. And he is a very good man, too.

Literature nowadays is a trade... the successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets.

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

Books represent the accumulated workings of the human mind, the endless treasures of man's thoughts.

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

Literary education must follow the education of the hand -the one gift that distinguishes man from beast.

He does not write at all whose poems no man reads

A man who means to think and write a great deal must, after six and twenty, learn to read with his fingers.

A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.

Pilgrim's Progress , about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

No amount of misfortune will satisfy the man who is not satisfied with reading a hundred epigrams.

My mom didn't write, but she loved to read. She liked books 'that made you a little nervous.' Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub were the three wise men of our family bookshelf.

Fortunately age does not affect literature. After a man is dead, he may continue in the business and often rank higher than his living competitors.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

Come on, man.... Hemingway, Sexton, Plath, Woolf. You can't kill yourself before you're even published.

Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.

A publisher is simply a useful middle-man.