Literary Merit Quotes

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

'Floating Worlds,' which received a fair amount of attention when it was first published, deserves rediscovery.

I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.

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

I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.

Every book that doesn't first have to get past a gatekeeper or two, or 10, before being put in front of the public will be worse.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.

There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

My books have all generated controversy.

When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise.

I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.