Quotes about Literature

this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

Our speculations about Shakespeare are almost as multifarious and foolish as our speculations about the maker of the universe, and, like those, are frequently concerned to establish that his works were not made by him but by another person of the same name.

Damn it, she writes detective stories and in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have.

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most "edifying" or "propaganda" literature. There is no diversity. The Energy is active only in one part of the whole, and in consequence the wholeness is destroyed and the Power diminished. You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.

No one seems to wash in Middle-earth.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

The blue-collar is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous.

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

The booksellers are generous liberal-minded men.