Quotes About Literature

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that's much closer to art and literature than any science.

A lot of Chinese martial arts films were based on Chinese martial arts novels. And these novels created a world of putting history, calligraphy, and martial arts into one.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.

Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art.

The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.

Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

I would categorize my books as literature, and I hope that is how they would be consumed. The books do not rely on the artwork to be understood, but I need my art practice to write them.

Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".

I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

Whether we know it or not, we are all in a quest after the Great Companion. All study, all art, all music, all literature, all government, all industry are in essence a search after the Infinite.

A community united by the ideals of compassion and creativity has incredible power. Art of all kinds---music, literature, traditional arts, visual arts---can lift a community.

Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.

People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.