Elie Wiesel Quotes

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

We take literature too seriously.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

Writers want to be reread. They want to think that their words don't just flash by but deserve some reflection.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.

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.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

Literature is news that stays news.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

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

If you're going to clutter up the world with more novels, you should do a little more than entertain people.

Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is me judice, no book,—it is a plaything.

I don't have a problem with many uses of the word genre, just certain ones. I have the most trouble when these labels are used to prevent discussion, to prevent a work from being taken seriously as literature. When we say "genre," we generally mean "something crappy," something that would be sold in an airport.

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

I would argue, for perspective's sake, that the arc of a really literary work is precisely that it both intensely reflects, and simultaneously transcends the conditions of its making. I would say that is the difference between literature and other kinds of writing. That is what the literary is - it ultimately doesn't matter what his circumstances were. And the thing that you were just saying about being sympathetic to Brontë and the fact that she could only write what she wrote when she wrote it... that's true. But look at that novel, which means so much to so many people.

I don't use the word lightly, in fact, I don't use it at all, but Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified-he makes the word new and thus the world.

I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.

Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.

I respect Millar, sir: he has raised the price of literature.