Literary Authority Quotes

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

For a country to have a great writer ... is like having another government. That’s why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Universal empire is the prerogative of a writer. His concerns are with all mankind, and though he cannot command their obedience,he can assign them their duty. The Republic of Letters is more ancient than monarchy, and of far higher character in the world than the vassal court of Britain.

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.

Power, for the writer, lies in his ability to reveal …

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing.

I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.

I can think of no one more qualified to write about the modern South than Curtis Wilkie

You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse.

Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.

The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel.

The faults of a writer of acknowledged excellence are more dangerous, because the influence of his example is more extensive; and the interest of learning requires that they should be discovered and stigmatized, before they have the sanction of antiquity conferred upon them, and become precedents of indisputable authority.

Thus, the poet's word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world.

I'm aware more than I was before I had books published that any review is a bit arbitrary - it's not really, say, 'The New York Times' that's authoritatively weighing in on the quality of a book, though it seems this way to the public.

So, then, the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war-stratagem the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it pleaseth him; having all, from Dante’s Heaven to his Hell, under the authority of his pen.

I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

A public role endures for the literary high-command, as sages and seers, speaking out on social and political issues.

If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

Oh, if Shakespeare says it, that's all right.

In mid-20th-century America, it could be argued that the novelist still had the most claim of anyone to omniscience. Whatever he/she couldn't prove, he/she could gesture at.