"The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice--although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical."
Submitted by Quonation
Category: Literature
"The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms."
"The existence of good bad literature--the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously--is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration."
"But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,"
"Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest "warmth"Mwhich may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be."
"Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."
"The quality of this novel is the way the plot is treated and not the plot itself."
"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstacy) is the norm."
"The novel is not "a crazy quilt of bits"; it is a logical sequence of psychological events: the movements of stars may seem crazy to the simpleton, but wise men know the comets come back."
"That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?"
"What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is."
"It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way."
"Isn't the greatest rule of all the rules simply to please?"
"It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh."
"Either over neither, both over either/or, live-and-let-live over stand-or die, high spirits over low, energy over apathy, wit over dullness, jokes over homilies, good humor over jokes, good nature over bad, feeling over sentiment, truth over poetry, consciousness over explanations, tragedy over pathos, comedy over tragedy, entertainment over art, private over public, generosity over meanness, charity over murder, love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle."
"... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age."
"To begin with, let us take the following motto (not especially for this chapter, but generally): Literature is Love. Now we can continue."
"Pushkin's composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its seep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance."
"Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest."
"A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader."
Page: 1 ... 116 117 118 119 120 ... 1890
Find quonation on:
Find quonation on:
Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest Tumblr Instagram RSS Feed