Literary Standards Quotes

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

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.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

Life is too short for reading inferior books.

I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don't want to write one!

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.

He was such a bad writer, they revoked his poetic license.

Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose.

It doesn't require much thought for one to realise that any travel book worthy of the name has to be a departure from the standard idea of the form.

Lord Chamberlain's readers or controllers, which were a handful of people working directly to him, were a very assorted group of people and some of them tried very hard to be as liberal as they could.

I've never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight' look like 'War and Peace.'

Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.

I read all kinds of novels, as long as they're good.

Few books today are forgivable.

People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it's less good than what I do, there's no point in reading it, if it's better than what I do it makes me depressed

In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive. A number of plays by playwrights who were thought very highly of then - they were very bad playwrights - were highly praised because their themes were intellectually and politically proper. This intellectual morass is very dangerous, it seems to me. A form of censorship.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.... Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words and they backhand them across the net.

I remember when they started publishing Latino fiction years ago. You had to be really good to get published. Now you don't have to be that good.

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never plotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.

We're living in a world where [Judy Blume] books were ever banned, and now like "Fifty Shades of Grey" is being read in high schools. Like it's just a wild.