"Reverence is fatal to literature."

Literature,

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"Literature is analysis after the event."

Doris Lessing, English Writer

Literature,

"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."

Susan Sontag, American Author

Literature, Art, Interpretation, Creativity

"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart."

Salman Rushdie, Indian Novelist

Literature, Truth, Imagination, Exploration

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

Chuck Palahniuk, American Novelist

Literature, Privacy, Consent, Affection, Expression

"And all who told it added something new And all who heard it made enlargements too."

Alexander Pope, English Poet

Literature, Storytelling, Truth, Memory, Change

"Bad literature is a form of treason."

Joseph Brodsky, American Poet

Literature, Treason

"Postmodernism cost literature its audience."

Scott Turow, American Novelist

Literature,

"For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years."

Jodi Picoult, American Novelist

Literature, Story, Legacy, Writing, Memory

"This book is the book you have just read. It's done."

Neil Gaiman, British Author

Literature, Completion, Books, End, Closure

"I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various."

Irwin Shaw, American Novelist

Literature, Formula, Style, Writers

Explore more quotes by E. M. Forster

"There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy."

Aesthetics

"There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started."

Aesthetics

"Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."

Nothing

"It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand."

Awareness

"If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire."

Art

"We move between two darknesses."

Transition

"Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land."

Love

"If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words."

Earth

"Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another."

Love

"I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness?"

Love