Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really com...es: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at... the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Having a book is somewhat like having a baby, as many woman writers have observed before me: the conception, the long preparation,... the wait, the growing heaviness (not of body in this case but of the spirit and the manuscript) toward the end, the initial delight at the sight of the product, fully formed and seemingly perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression. What will people whose opinion I care about, and those whose views I don't value but have weight in the world of reader, think of it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. A...nyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which Spenser and Dante had just begun to read,... he cuts it down, coins a pine-tree shilling (as if to signify the pine's value to him), puts up a deestrict schoolhouse, and introduces Webster's spelling book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the scientists hope to do is describe the universe mathematically, predict it, and maybe control it. The philosopher, by contr...ast, seems unbecomingly ambitious. He wants to understand the universe; to get behind phenomena and operation and solve the logically prior riddles of being, knowledge, and value. But the artist, and in particular the novelist, in his essence wishes neither to explain nor to control nor to understand the universe. He wants to make one of his own, and may even aspire to make it more orderly, meaningful, beautiful, and interesting than the one God turned out. What's more, in the opinion of many readers of literature, he sometimes succeeds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The crew was complete: it included a Boots-- A maker of Bonnets and Hoods--... A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes-- And a Broker, to value their goods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And for the citation of so many authors, 'tis the easiest thing in nature. Find out one of these books with an alphabetical index,... and without any farther ceremony, remove it verbatim into your own ... there are fools enough to be thus drawn into an opinion of the work; at least, such a flourishing train of attendants will give your book a fashionable air, and recommend it for sale.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am told that Duclos' book is not in vogue in Paris, and that it is being violently criticized, apparently because readers unders...tand it; and being intelligible is no longer the fashion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »