(169 quotes found)
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
Bertolt Brecht
“The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.”
Paul de Man
“Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.”
Gaston Bachelard
“Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.”
Voltaire
“He left the self-conscious literary demimonde of New York for the quiet infidelities of New England.”
John Heilpern
“Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.”
Robertson Davies
“Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.”
John Kenneth Galbraith
“Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.”
Leo Rosten
“There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write”
Thomas Carlyle
