Moliere Quotes

Literature precedes genre.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

I was an English major.

I have a huge passion for literature.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

I was an English major in college!

The writer studies literature, not the world.

I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I'm not that well-versed in literary theory - I don't know what it is.

I was an English major in college with minors in Fine Arts and Humanities.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

I wish I had read more and majored in literature rather than theatre. I think I would have been a better artist for it. I am trying to play catch-up now.

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.

Milan Kundera was my literature professor. He's a Francophile, so he made us read French novels like 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses,' which I made a version of many years later as 'Valmont.'

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.