Andre Gide Quotes

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

At the end of the day, I'm writing in a genre that isn't highly regarded.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular 'ism', but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.

A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste.

It may be important to write a book that doesn't come up to what I would like to have rather than to write no book at all.

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.