Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

[Critiquing the Gettysburg Address:] We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln would produce a paper so slipshod, so loose-joined, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp.

There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.

I'm an essayist. And this is a genre that has existed for a few thousand years. Ever heard of Cicero? So these rules that I'm working under are not mine but rather were established by writers who recognized the difference between the hard research of journalism and the kind of inquiry of mind that characterizes the essay.

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.

I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.

In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.

Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

I try not to think about the trope or whether or not my books are like 'Fifty' or 'Crossfire' or any other series.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.