Sean O'Casey Quotes

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

English culture is highly literary-based.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

Very wonderful books might be published, and very terrible books might be published.

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.

Literature is news that stays news.

There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.

I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

When I pick up a book that's, you know, wreathed in laurels, I expect a lot, and that doesn't give the book its best chance to shine.

The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.

Writing in India will not dramatically change till we learn to value books.

I hope I'm not just looked as a writer that is popular but as a writer of literary value.

A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.

There's little question that short stories, like poetry, don't get the respect they deserve in the culture - but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.

The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.

On the strength of his literary output alone... any woman of sense would decline to tackle D.H. Lawrence at 1,000 pounds a night.

Books are dead men talking.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way.