Literary Quality Quotes

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.

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.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

The writing I tend to think of as 'good' is good because it's mysterious.

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

The thing I am attracted to is just good writing and stories that are based somewhat in reality.

I've read a lot of fiction from writers just starting out, and the dialogue is a little bit forced, or it's almost too teenager-y, or too slang-y or putting too much technology or trends in there. I try to stay pretty trend-neutral. I try not to mention too many current bands or current TV shows.

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

With 'True Grit,' the language was very specific, as is Shakespeare. You couldn't really improvise, nor would you really ever have to. I never felt the need to. It was all so beautifully written, and it was all right there.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

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

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

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.

I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.

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

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.

The specific excellence of verbal expression in poetry is to be clear without being low.

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

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

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

I think any good literature, whether it's for children or for adults, will appeal to everybody. As far as children's literature goes, adults should be able to read it and enjoy it as much as a child would.

There's no literary merit in my books.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.