No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn’t yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it’s still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.
The book is the world’s most patient medium.
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that’s imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it’s as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.
A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art’s sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.
Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don’t mind being that.
Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.
Writers don’t seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
To bring anything really to life in literature we can’t be lifelike: we have to be literature-like.
One doesn’t bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There’s no adventure of the mind.
No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.
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.