John Metcalf Quotes

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

Bad literature is a form of treason.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

Despite the ever-increasing financial pressures experienced by writers and the ever-decreasing space afforded by the media to books, writers are still willing to aim for quality and to take risks.

In its fifty-first year of publication, 'The Paris Review' continues to search for new ways to bring together writers and readers.

Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches, nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.

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

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.

Young gentlemen with literary aspirations usually start a new university magazine, which for wit and pungency is designed to eclipse all such previous efforts, and I was no exception in the matter of this popular gambit.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

Our literature is in great shape.

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

Minor writers think style is all.

'The Paris Review's mandate has been the same for fifty years. First and foremost, this magazine is for writers; the editors' task is to support and celebrate them, especially at the beginning of their careers, but also as they move forward, venturing stories that are creative, risky, new.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

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 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.

When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.