4,370 Quotes About Literature

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.

Moral writing is boring.

If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet.

What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul.

Valuing a writer only for their diversity, but not their humanity or talent – that’s tokenism.

A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

La calidad literaria es inversamente proporcional al número de lectores.

اعتدت على العيش وحيدة ولم أعد قادرة على تقاسم حياتي مع رجل

واجبك هو أن تخرس، إذا كنت لا تريد أن تعامل كمتواطئ