Quotes About Literature

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

No doubt can exist that the ancient Egyptians were fully aware of the wondrous mysteries which numbers are able to disclose, so, considering that Greece, and neither Judea nor Babylon, succeeded to the empires of ancient Egypt, it is a curious fact how little knowledge of the dogmas of the Hierophants of Sais, Memphis and Thebes Greek literature has transmitted to us.

Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination. What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of The Golden Age, Barry Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than the rest of us.

and that he delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a schoolmaster reads him for the grammar.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

Although you be, as I am, one of those Who feel a Christian ought to write in prose, For poetry is magic: born in sin, you May read it to exorcies the Gentile in you.

For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

If a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer 'writer' for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer poetry would embarrass us both.

Enormous novels by co-eds. Rain down on our defenceless heads. Till our teeth chatter.

When a reviewer describes a book as 'sincere,' one knows immediately that it is a) insincere (insincerely insincere) and b) badly written.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." — W. H. Auden

Whatever else it may or may not be, I want every poem I write to be a hymn in praise of the English language.

The public will stand, nay even enjoy, a good deal of poetry.

If I were asked to name people whom I considered true Christians, the name 'George Orwell' is one of the first that would come to my mind.

I am more than a little jealous that the wonder I am party to has been sprinkled over Salinger's gray head.