The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.
I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.
I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.
I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.
For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.
Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.
Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
When a new book is published, read an old one.
Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.
Nothing like this has been attempted before. (...) It might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning, with much fierce argument and discussion to come. But whatever the outcome of ensuing criticisms or objections, The World Republic of Letters -- empire more than republic, as Casanova shows -- is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said's Orientalism, with which it stands comparison.
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
My dad reads the scripts and passes them on to me.
Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read.
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
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.
A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.
Those quotations were really quite obscure. Anyone can see that he is a very well read man.
I think the criticism that I take to heart is from other writers that I respect.
I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
