34 Quotes by Steven Moore

While it would be too reductive (but not wrong) to say Cervantes equates knight-errantry with religious belief, he does seem to insinuate a syllogism that goes: Chivalric novels are false; the Bible resembles those novels; therefore, the Bible is false. But Cervantes gleefully complicates matters by insisting repeatedly that Don Quixote is true, which he and everyone who reads it knows is untrue.

If a third of the stories in the Decameron mock religion, two-thirds celebrate sex.

Novelists always set up obstacles for lovers to overcome to make their eventual union all the more sastisfying, but Gomberville portrays love as a long, tedious ocean voyage to someplace miserable.

Aretino was a satirist on the noble if futile quest to reform his corrupt society by shoving its face in its worse excesses. (Futile because has any society ever reformed itself after being shown the error of its ways by a satirist? anywhere? ever?)

The difference between mainstream fiction and literature is what their writers do with words; the former places its emphasis on the story rather than the language used to tell that story; in literature, the language is the story; that is, the story is primarily a vehicle for a linguistic display of the writer's rhetorical abilities.

Sorel's novels deserve to be revived, but Polexander can be left in its watery grave.

And if the novel [The Education of Cyrus] remains dull by modern standards, we have to remind ourselves Xenophon didn't set out to write a "novel" — there was no such thing yet in his culture — but was feeling his way to a new form somewhere between factual history and fanciful epic. Our hat is always off to innovators.

So we'll leave him [Plato] to the philosophers and not try to make a novelist of him against his will; he excluded innovative artists from his ideal republic, so we'll exclude him from our republic of fiction.

Blessings be upon you, Heliodorus, for bringing the novel into full intellectual maturity and for showing what this newfangled genre could be in the hands of a master.