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The young man was rebaptizing her, she was a child—and as fresh as her name. Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March.

For a significant intellectual product to make a broad and deep immediate appeal, there must be a hidden affinity, indeed a congruence, between the personal destiny of the author and the wider destiny of his generation. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.

When we try to translate truth out of one sphere into another, whether from life into books or from books into lectures, something happens to truth, it goes wrong, not suddenly when it might be detected, but slowly. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

Literature isn’t a profession at all. I’ll have you know—it is a curse. And when do we first discover that this curse has come upon us? At a terrible early age. An age when by rights one should still be living at peace and harmony with God and the world. You begin to feel that […]

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

Let the schools of literary criticism, rapacious fingerlings, resort to the facts of the author’s life before they can interpret the text. Nadine Gordimer, “The Empire of Joseph Roth.”

I did my annual life expectancy calculation today. I’m expected to live to 90. I seem to be doing a little better every year (perhaps by not dying in the preceding year). I seem to remember that the first time I did this—three years ago, I was halfway to death that time as well.

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that […]

All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.