Literary Worth Quotes

It is not how many books thou hast, but how good; careful reading profiteth, while that which is full of variety delighteth.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Books worth reading are worth re-reading.

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

When poems are no good they don't make any sense.

I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents.

If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good.

The good of a book lies in its being read.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

I'm a girl, so I've experienced dismissal because I was a girl or because I write about girls: my book with a guy protagonist is treated as more literary and worthy than my other books with girl protagonists.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

There are those who believe that the value of a children's book can be measured only in terms of the moral lessons it tries to impose or the perfect role models it offers. Personally, I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two. In fact, I happen to think that's huge.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Most books are surplus to the world's requirements, and I am going to sound very conceited here, but I am trying to write books that aren't just using up trees.

There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it.

I don't look at stories in genres. A good story is a good story, no matter what planet it happens on, whether the characters are mice or human or whatever. That's how I look at it.

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book - it is a plaything.

Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.

It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.

By all means read the Puritans, they are worth more than all the modern stuff put together.

The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.