American literature Quote by H. L. Mencken

Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.

— Theodore Dreiser

“Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author's first books, LANARK and UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is to be…

— Alasdair Gray

“Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to…

— Jane Austen

“There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs…

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For…

— Robert Stone

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

— Italo Calvino

“What The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests is how a novel, by presenting phenomena before it present resolutions, can create an on-going, perhaps spurious, but…

— Ian Gregor

[Louis] Brandeis improves the prose. He simplifies it and perfects the balance of the sentence so it becomes even more memorable and aphoristic.

— Jeffrey Rosen

“He saw a square room furnished as a library. The entire section of the walls which he could spy was covered from floor to…

— James Stephens

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

— Arundhati Roy

“All novels are impossible. We would not wish to read them if they were not. Can you imagine how dull a tale would be…

— Caitlin Williams