Century Quote by James A. Michener

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles…

— Mark Leyner

I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in…

— Michel Faber

No writer, however popular, disdains a reader, however humble.

— Vera Caspary

Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is…

— Orhan Pamuk

“as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century”

— Oscar Wilde

“Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else—that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his…

— George Orwell

“Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.”

— Annie Dillard

“Your problem, dear chap, as I have had occassion to remind you, is that you see but you do not observe; you hear but…

— Edward B. Hanna

“I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that…

— Pat Conroy

“[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It is the…

— Edward Abbey

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“I scanned the criticisms of recent books to see if there were any that resembled mine. I resented them all; it seemed to me…

— Daphne du Maurier