238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.

It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.

Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.

The book is the world's most patient medium.