“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.”
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
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William Dean Howells 18
author, critic and playwright from the United States 1837–1920Related quotes

Caxtoniana: Hints on Mental Culture (1862)

Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967) “The Struggle Intensifies,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (1970).

“Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work.”
Literature and Life, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Context: Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Entry in his journal before his last public appearance, the ceremony at which he received the National Medal for Literature, quoted by Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
A literatura é a maneira mais agradável de ignorar a vida.
Variant: To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.
Source: The Book of Disquietude, trans. Richard Zenith, text 116
"All Literature", from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)