George Saintsbury Quotes

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

Fiction is able to encompass books that are bleak and which dwell on the manifold and terrible problems of our times. But I don't think that all books need to have that particular focus.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

I used to write books and plays in my mind, but I doubt that any of them would have been above the level of the cheapest dime novel.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

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

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

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.

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

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

The magical and fantastical isn't something I'm uncomfortable with in books, and I chafe slightly at the idea that a purely realist novel somehow has more value.

I'll take any story if it's good.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?'

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.

I feel like the books were just written like a movie. You read it and you can just kind of see everything. Before I went in to read with the director, I read the first book and I loved it. I didn't realize how good the writing was. And then I went in and read with Gary Ross, and that was it.