Virginia Woolf Quotes

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

We take literature too seriously.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

A book makes claims of literary art.

The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.

Literature is a great staff, but a very sorry crutch.

At the end of the day, I'm writing in a genre that isn't highly regarded.

Literature precedes genre.

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti had a tremendous education as an artist and also an enormous knowledge of literarture.

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.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I remember having to read 'The Old Man and the Sea,' and I didn't want to read it; I didn't want to like Ernest Hemingway. I was being a stubborn teenager.

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

All literature is gossip.