Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach Quotes

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.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.

I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.

I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.

My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what's the purpose of reading, and maybe that it's not that cool to hate something just because it's popular.

Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people reading 'Midnight's Children?' Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

It's that experienced eye that knows what the public loves and how to create that Hollywood magic that drives pop culture.

The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.

Literary commercialism is lowering the intellectual standard to accommodate the purse and to meet a frivolous demand for amusement instead of for improvement.

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative.

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called ''significant literature'' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

Nine-tenths of all existing books are nonsense.

They say nobody has the attention span to read great books early in life. If I start to read something good, I'll look and it's 86 pages already. Attention span. What are they talking about? If it's good, it'll drag you in.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change.

Sometimes I listen to the radio and I can't believe some of the stuff that I'm hearing that everyone is loving. So it's a task that we've got to conquer and we have to make sure that we pass the test.

Life is too short for reading inferior books.

When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - "hoping that I like the book as much as he does" - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.