Top 59 Bad Literature Quotes
#2. The existence of good bad literature - the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously - is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
George Orwell
#3. All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.
George Henry Lewes
#4. Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.
Andre Gide
#5. But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heedlessness, not though courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write. But bad literature brings no redemption.
Umberto Eco
#6. It is with fine sentiments that bad literature is made. Descend to the bottom of the well if you wish to see the stars.
Andre Gide
#7. In one sense at any rate it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men.
G.K. Chesterton
#8. The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good; just as a real and affectionate acquaintance with honest people gives a better protection against rogues than a habitual distrust of everyone.
C.S. Lewis
#9. Bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.
George Eliot
#10. It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
Andre Gide
#11. Pornography is writing that seeks primarily, even exclusively, to bring about sexual stimulation. This can be done crudely or delicately. In the former case it would be bad literature; in the latter good.
Kenneth Tynan
#12. I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.
Asa Larsson
#13. The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
Chinua Achebe
#14. And found there one of those huge comprehensive anthologies of literature, the sort of thing which, on a bad day, can induce an inferiority complex ...
Sara Levine
#15. Every time we linger in bad company whose insidious influence we know we cannot resist, every time we lie in bed when we ought to be up and praying, every time we read pornographic literature, every time we take a risk which strains our self-control, we are sowing, sowing, sowing to the flesh.
John R.W. Stott
#16. Bad is the world, and all will come to naught
when such ill-dealing must be seen in thought.
William Shakespeare
#18. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money - it's always been like that.
Walter Moers
#19. Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick.
Charles Lamb
#20. To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.
Susan Sontag
#21. As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of ... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false.
Victor Hugo
#22. I am Captain James Hook! I am no victim; I create them! I do not have bad dreams; I inspire them!
Heidi Schulz
#23. And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
Jerry Pournelle
#24. She liked getting hold of some book ... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.
Virginia Woolf
#25. People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.
Minnie Maddern Fiske
#26. I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.
China Mieville
#27. A full mind is unlucky if a good idea comes to enter inside; an empty mind is unlucky if a bad idea comes to enter inside!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#28. But this is exactly why I read
and don't belong to a book group
because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.
Peter Orner
#29. When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.
Rudyard Kipling
#30. This used to be about sex. The literature of my people was pornography, filled with cries for mercy, drama enacted on people without prolonged negotiation, partners engaged in a dance in the middle of a bonfire. Now, it's 300-page manuals about how to make sure nothing bad will happen.
Laura Antoniou
#31. The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
Tom Waits
#32. In school, I hated poetry - those skinny,
Malnourished poems that professors love;
The bad grammar and dirty words that catch
In the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech.
Pablo, your words are rain I run through,
Grass I sleep in.
George Elliott Clarke
#33. When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.
Italo Calvino
#34. Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
Gunter Grass
#35. The reason I write romance is that I like happy endings. The idea, you know, 'It's not literature unless is ends badly,' and I really don't like that. There's enough misery and bad things happening in the world.
Ruth Glick
#36. Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.
Dejan Stojanovic
#37. There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.
Pliny
#38. Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#39. I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.
David Eddings
#40. Clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.
Edith Hamilton
#41. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Ben Lerner
#42. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#43. To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.
Walt Whitman
#44. Axel smiled. "They say that good judgment comes from experience. And experience come from bad judgment." Alec laughed...
Ward Just
#46. It is right for you, young men, to enrich yourselves with the spoils of all pure literature; but he who would make a favorite of a bad book, simply because it contains a few beautiful passages, might as well caress the hand of an assassin because of the jewelry which sparkles on his fingers.
Joseph Parker
#47. Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#48. If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad
George Orwell
#49. The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'
Alexander Payne
#50. I'm from Europe, and I was very aware that there are a lot of literature snobs - especially in Europe. As soon as something becomes a success, it has to be bad, and then they'll do everything they can to stab it to death.
Anne Fortier
#51. I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
Dashiell Hammett
#52. To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool.
Dejan Stojanovic
#53. As factual and thoughtful literature began to seep in, against the Nazis' will, and replace the reams of Nazi propaganda, I began to see the German Jew in his historical role, in his good as well as his bad light.
Martha Dodd
#54. If bad things are happening in your country, remember, the first responsible person is your stupid government! But if you have supported that government, now, you are the first responsible person! So sit down and shut up!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#55. I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.
John Waters
#56. Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.
Joshua Cohen
#57. It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe.
Margaret Atwood
#58. Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.
Roger Ebert
#59. If you tell me bad things about someone, you're telling bad things about me behind me
Miguel El Portugues
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