The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books.
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.
Readers prefer a world they can relate to.
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.
Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.
The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.
I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.
The writer studies literature, not the world.