Quotes about literature

Why do countries have to have literatures? Why does a country like Canada, so late upon the international scene, feel that it must rapidly acquire the trappings of older countries – music of its own, pictures of its own, books of its own – and why does it fuss and stew, and storm the heavens with its outcries when it does not have them?

But what ailed Little Eva St. Clair, in Uncle Tom's Cabin? What carried off Little Nell?...They have no clear symptoms, and seem to die of Ingrowing Virtue.

There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.

In my country of birth the great new fictional practitioners have in their front rank names like Rushdie, Ishiguro, Kureishi, Mo. This attainment on their part makes me oddly proud to be whatever I am, and convinces me that internationalism is the highest form of patriotism.

The modern English literary world, at any rate the high-brow section of it, is a sort of poisonous jungle where only weeds can flourish.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called "thought".

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

'''The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.

“I always play with everybody,” said Honoré. “It is my vocation. God put me on the earth to do with people what cats do to mice. Play with them, chew the last bit of life out of them, them pick them up in my mouth and drop them on people’s doorsteps. That is the business of literature.”