Literature

Quotes about Literature.

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• "Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."
  • Oscar Wilde

• "It's not that he 'bites off more than he can chew' but he chews more than he bites off."
  • Clover Adams on Henry James

• "We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you."
  • James Joyce to W.B. Yeats

• "Why don't you write books people can read?"
  • Mrs. Nora Joyce to her husband, James Joyce

• "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
  • Samuel Johnson

• "If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come."
  • Raymond Chandler

• "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend to read it."
  • Groucho Marx on Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge by Sidney J. Perelman

• "The covers of this book are too far apart."
  • Ambrose Bierce in a review

• "Where were you fellows when the paper was blank?"
  • Fred Allen after writers had heavily edited his script

• "[Literature is] an organised violence committed on ordinary speech."
  • Russian literary theorist Roman Jakobson

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