Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.
I read good. I was an English major.
We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.
England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.
Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.
Know your genre. Know your history. Read a book.
Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.
Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.
I prefer dead writers because you don't run into them at parties.
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.
I was an English major in college!
When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.
It's interesting to note that all revolutionary literature was written by pastors. These guys were involved in a revolution against the mightiest power that the world had ever seen.
When I was growing up, there actually wasn't a lot of YA literature as it exists today. Most of the YA that I read was from the '60s and '70s, older than me.
Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.
The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.
What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century
From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.
I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.
