William Dean Howells: Quotes about literature

William Dean Howells was author, critic and playwright from the United States. Explore interesting quotes on literature.

William Dean Howells: 36 quotes 3 likes

“Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature.”

William Dean Howells

In Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Editor's Study Christmas Literature (December 1888), p. 158-59, as quoted in An Imperative Duty, Appendix D, 7

Life , War , World , Literature

“I am not sorry for having wrought in common, crude material so much; that is the right American stuff; and perhaps hereafter, when my din is done, if anyone is curious to know what that noise was, it will be found to have proceeded from a small insect which was scraping about on the surface of our life and trying to get into its meaning for the sake of the other insects larger or smaller. That is, such has been my unconscious work; consciously, I was always, as I still am, trying to fashion a piece of literature out of the life next at hand.”

William Dean Howells

Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (26 April 1903)

Life , Literature , Fashion

“Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”

William Dean Howells

My Mark Twain http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3390/3390.txt (1910)

Literature