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"Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility."
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Exlpore more Literature quotes
"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
"Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must."
"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"
"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."
"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"
Explore more quotes by Wallace Stevens
"In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."
"What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality."
"Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art."
"Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore."
"To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind."
"Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom."
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