Being judged Quote by Michel de Montaigne

“The periphery of a place can tell us a great deal about its heartland. Along the edge of a nation's territory, its real prejudices,…

— Derek Lundy

To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the…

— Richard Bausch

“No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich…

— John Updike

“To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the…

— Richard Bausch

the habit of generalizing from one particular, that mainstay of the cheap and obvious essayist, has rooted many fictions in the public eye. Nothing,…

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature--poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has…

— Henry Seidel Canby

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because…

— William Trevor

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local…

— Renata Adler

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years…

— P. D. James

Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization…

— Vijay Seshadri

The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our…

— Saul Bellow

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms…

— Simone de Beauvoir