Quotes About Literary trends

Sometimes people run out and read a lot of books, but they don't absorb anything from them. They want to read the next popular book.

Only those books which consistently produce high profits are allowed to survive, and a number of "good books" have slipped quietly out of print. It is less likely than it used to be for a scholar or a teacher or a librarian - or a child - simply to come in contact with a book which is neither brand new nor extremely popular.

I can't help feeling that the good books were purchased because they were talked of as being popular, and the trash was bought because it suited best.

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to 'serious' courses replete with 'trends ' and 'schools ' and 'myths ' and 'symbols ' and 'social comment ' and something unspeakably spooky called 'climate of thought.' Actually these 'serious' courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.

Selv om det ingen gjester var, var Anna like opptatt med seg selv som ellers og dessuten svært opptatt av å lese - både romaner og alvorlige bøker, slike som var på mote nå. Hun bestilte alle de bøkene som ble rosende omtalt i de utenlandske avisene og tidsskriftene hun mottok, og pløyet dem igjennom med den oppmerksomhet for det man leser som man bare finner hos mennesker i ensomhet.

You go through more bestsellers than a McCarthy bonfire.

My favorite kind of science fiction is post-apocalyptic dystopia. But I just heard at the bar that genre is going out of style. Frankly, that's not a future I want to live in.

A fashionable milieu is one in which each person's opinion is made up of everyone else's opinions. Does each opinion run counter to everyone else's? Then it is a literary milieu.

In the past," a writer friend of Ethan's had recently said, over lots of beer, "everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It's like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.