A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.
Literature is a power to be possessed, not a body of objects to be studied.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
A perfect judge will read each word of wit with the same spirit that its author writ.
In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.
To be a good diarist, one must have a little snouty, sneaky mind.
Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end.
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
Contemporary literature can be classified under three headings: the neurotic, the erotic and the tommy-rotic.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress.
One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts.
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.
The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Biography is one of the new terrors of death.
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others.