Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

We take literature too seriously.

Never measure literature by accounting statistics. A quarter of working authors earn less than $1,000.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

I see 'Eligible' as a homage, and I see 'Pride and Prejudice' as a perfect book. You can dispute whether this project is a good idea, but you can't dispute my fondness for the novel.

Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.

Between 1961 and 1982, 'The Catcher in the Rye' was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States. But all the talk about banning it made me rush out to find it.

Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.