Whit Stillman Quotes

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

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.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.

Critic's delight: scolding the Mighty Dead.

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

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

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

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

Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.

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

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

I can always tell when I'm about to start writing. I go through cycles in reading. When I'm beginning to start to write something, I start reading what I think of as good literature. I read things with wonderful language.

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.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

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

Now I've got a fairly good grasp of the 18th century on what was common and what people thought. But I don't write in order. I write bits and pieces and sort of glue them.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

Sometimes my readers ask me what else they should read, and I recommend Sebald.