Books Quote by Milan Kundera

Now the novels that are read are purely entertainment – well done, very polished, with a very effective technique – but not literature, just entertainment.

— Mario

All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that…

— Jo Nesbo

At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a…

— Teju Cole

The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

— J. G. Ballard

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

— Doris Lessing

My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are…

— Joanna Trollope

The first modern novel was already a product, even an expression, of negative criticism: 'Don Quixote' contains a quite explicit critique of the chivalric…

— Elif Batuman

There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have…

— Jane Austen

“Contemporary literature, in each and every epoch, is the worst enemy of culture. A reader’s limited time is wasted in reading a thousand books…

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“If fast-paced entertainment is not among the pleasures generally offered by the literary novel, other pleasure often abound: a richness of language, a heart-breaking…

— Joshua Henkin

In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart,…

— Ruth Glick

“But behind the superficial appearance of a time of radical upheaval, most governments and ordinary people simply did not experience the Belle Époque in…

— Paul Ham