Serious Literature Quotes

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.

I read a lot of heavy literature when I'm on set, so on holiday I want to indulge in something light-hearted.

Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

I think it's absurd to believe that movies should look like paintings and say something like serious books say something.

She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.

Imagination doesn’t just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I don’t, and never would, write Real Books.

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

Excessively narrow reading is unhelpful, certainly. Reading only Serious Literature is no better than reading only trash in this respect.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.

The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it. I don't write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.

I think quite a misguided literary culture has grown up in the 20th century that says a book has to have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness of language.

There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.

If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?