Language is the ordinary medium of daily communication – unlike music or paint

Prose is always simple in this sense, because language is the ordinary medium of daily communication – unlike music or paint. Our ordinary possessions are being borrowed by even very difficult writers: the millionaires of style – difficult lavish stylists like Sir Thomas Browne, Melville, Ruskin, Lawrence, James, Woolf – are very prosperous, but they use the same banknotes as everyone else

J. Wood, How fiction works (10th Anniversary edition. 2019), 157-8

They have not read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it

You only have to teach literature to realise that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful. We grow as readers, and twenty-year-olds are relative virgins. They have not read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it.

J. Wood, How fiction works (10th Anniversary edition. 2019), 62

There shall be a twenty-year ban on novels set in Oxford and Cambridge

4) There shall be a twenty-year ban on novels set in Oxford and Cambridge, and a ten year ban on other university fiction. No ban on fiction set in polytechnics (though no subsidy to encourage it). No ban on novels set in primary schools; a ten-year ban on secondary-school fiction. A partial ban on growing-up novels (one per author allowed). A partial ban on novels written in the historic present (again, one per author). A total ban on on novels where the main character is a journalist or a television presenter.

J. Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), 111-2

Actually, the whole list of proposed literary bans is great. In full, the narrator bans novels 

1. Where people revert to the 'natural condition' of man
2. About incest
3. Set in abbatoirs
4. Set in Oxford and Cambridge (as above)
5. Set in South America (quota system)
6. With scenes of bestiality
7. About small forgotten wars in distant parts of the British Empire
8. Where any major character is identified by a single letter
9. About other novels
10. With 'allegorical, metaphorical, allusive, offstage, imprecise and ambiguous uses of God' 

I liked Western novels better because of the bitches in them

When I was left home alone, I would put on my mother’s dress and heels and sit on the couch reading Anna Karenina. Society balls, servants, aiguillettes...romantic trysts...I liked everything up to the part when Anna throws herself under the train: What did she do that for? She was beautiful and rich...for love? Not even Tolstoy could convince me...I liked Western novels better because of the bitches in them, the beautiful bitches that men would shoot themselves over and suffer for. Fall at their feet. The last time I cried over unrequited love was when I was seventeen—I spent the whole night in the bathroom with the tap running. My mother consoled me with poems by Pasternak

S. Alexievich, tr. B. Shayevich, Second-hand time (2013), 499

But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with us.

To my mind King James's Bible has been a very harmful influence on English prose. I am not so stupid as to deny its great beauty. It is majestical. But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with us. Those hyperboles, those luscious metaphors, are foreign to our genius. I cannot but think that not the least of the misfortunes that the Secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual life of our country is that this work for so long a period became the daily, and with many the only, reading of our people. Those rhythms, that powerful vocabulary, that grandiloquence, became part and parcel of the national sensibility.

W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 34

I have read a good many books on the art of fiction and all ascribe very small value to the plot

As a writer of fiction I go back, through innumerable generations, to the teller of tales round the fire in the cavern that sheltered neolithic men. I have had some sort of story to tell and it has interested me to tell it. To me it has been a sufficient object in itself. It has been my misfortune that for some time now a story has been despised by the intelligent. I have read a good many books on the art of fiction and all ascribe very small value to the plot. (In passing I should like to say that I cannot understand the sharp distinction some clever theorists make between story and plot. A plot is merely the pattern on which the story is arranged.) From these books you would judge that it is only a hindrance to the intelligent author and a concession that he makes to the stupid demands of the public.

W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 216

The fact is that they [The English] are suspicious of form

The sermons that Henry James preached to the English on form in the novel aroused their interest, but have little affected their practice. The fact is that they are suspicious of form. They find in it a sort of airlessness; its constraint irks them; they feel that when the author has fixed upon his material a wilful shape life has slipped through his fingers.

W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 206

They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved; they do not understand that what interests you is the way in which you have created the illusion. Anthony Trollope ceased to be read for thirty years because he confessed that he wrote at regular hours and took care to get the best price he could for his work.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 77-8

Immortality for literary productions lasts in any case but a few hundred years

I think few serious writers, by which I do not only mean writers of serious things, can be entirely indifferent to the fate that will befall their works after their death. It is pleasant to think, not that one may achieve immortality (immortality for literary productions lasts in any case but a few hundred years and then is seldom more than the immortality of the schoolroom) but that one may be read with interest by a few generations and find a place, however small, in the history of one's country's literature. But so far as I am concerned, I look upon this modest possibility with scepticism.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 11-12

All the myths of England come not from the Anglo-Saxons but from the Celts

For what people believe is true is a force, even if it is not true. Myth may be a driving force: such as the myth of inevitability, encountered in Calvin, or of invincibility, as at Sparta. Myth may also be the soul of history, engendering imaginative literature in poetry or prose.

Some races, it seems, are more mythopoeic than others. The myths of ancient Greece are as inseparable from Greek history as they are from Greek literature. The Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, have been the least mythopoeic of peoples. The English have created one of the great literatures of the world. Yet, have they a singe myth that they can call their own? Almost all peoples have a myth of their own origin: a heroic age; divine descent; the discovery and colonisation of their land. The Anglo-Saxons have no such thing: no halo of romance surrounds the misty figures of their alleged leaders , Hengist and Horsa. All the myths of England come not from the Anglo-Saxons but from the Celts.

H.R. Trevor Roper, The invention of Scotland (2014), xxi

Since French was a foreign language for the Russian reader, it is arguable that every translation should keep those sentences in French. Yet none does.

To take a famous example, the opening lines of War and Peace in the original are: 'Eh bien, mon prince' followed by long passages in French spoken by Russians as if it were their normal everyday language. the characters in question are aristocrats who converse with one another in French for reasons of fashion and snobbery - something the linking text (in Russia) makes clear   Ironically the discussion is about the possible invasion of Russia by Napoleon and 'toutes les atrocites de cet Antichrist.'  Since French was a foreign language for the Russian reader, it is arguable that every translation  should keep those sentences in French. Yet none does.

 J. Erdal, Ghosting: a double life (2004), 85-6

I should like to assert flatly that detective fiction and science fiction are akin

Without attempting to rival the complexity of my comparative analysis of jazz and science fiction, I should like to assert flatly that detective fiction and science fiction are akin. There is a closely similar exaltation of idea or plot over characterisation, and some modern science fiction, like most detective fiction, but unlike the thriller, invites the reader to solve a puzzle. It is no coincidence—how could it be?—that from Poe through Conan Doyle to Fredric Brown (the Midas expert) the writer of the one will often have some sort of concern with the other.

K. Amis, new maps of  hell (1960), 16

Scientific detection is 'too easy'.

 For all its associations with sportsmanship, cricket is governed by complicated laws, and Milne reckoned that if the detective novel was a game, readers and writers need to know the rules. When The Red House Mystery was reprinted, he set out half a dozen key points:

1. The story should be written in good English.
2. Love interest is undesirable.
3. Both detective and villain should be amateurs.
4. Scientific detection is 'too easy'.
5. The reader should know as much as the detective.
6. There should be a Watson: it is better for the detective 'to watsonize' than soliliquize.

M. Edwards, The Golden age of murder (2015), 113

Chances are you'll notice that it's a shallow, narcissistic whine

Books have their own sweet spot. Some arrive too late (the window for The Cather in the Rye is narrow; read it after the age of 16, and chances are you'll notice that it's a shallow, narcissistic whine) and some too soon: I was put off the whole of Russian literature by too early an encounter with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But others have perfect pitch and perfect timing, and recalling your first encounter is like remembering a summer day from your teens. They're the books that lodge in your heart while it's still wide open. and they become the platform the reading that you'll do ever after.

I read enough at that age to have a fairly wide platform, even it 's one whose strength I've not often tested in the intervening years. Nobody wants to discover that they're walking on rotting woodwork.

M. Herron,'Partying down at the Palace', Slightly Foxed 66 (2020), 35

That is what time does to literature

It is seventy plus years since those days through which we live in the two war [Balkan and Levant] trilogies. Olivia Manning died in 1980. I wonder if it matters how much she wrote out of her own direct experience and how much she created from her imagination - 'made up'.

Does it ever matter? Only at the time, perhaps. A decade, or half a century later, it is all one. The books stand or fall by themselves. That is what time does to literature. And these novels stand. They come up fresh every re-reading.

S. Hill, Jacob's room is full of books (2017), 168

Literature was born when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him

He [Nabokov] has a point, and the point makes me think, but it does not give me the lightening flash of illumination that this does, a page or two later: 'Literature was born, not on the day a boy came crying wolf, wolf out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.'

S. Hill, Jacob's room is full of books (2017), 145
She is citing here Nabokov's Lectures on literature, which I now want to read

One had to read the books of second-rate novelists to have an authentic picture of an epoch

Elsewhere he (Lampedusa) argued that history could not be understood properly without a knowledge of literature, especially minor literature. To find out what shopkeepers and railway workers were thinking in the 1920s, he remarked, there was not point reading the works of Giovanni Gentile. One had to read the books of second-rate novelists to have an authentic picture of an epoch, and although this might require patience, a strong stomach and a dose of bad taste, it was worth it. 'Ungrammatical, illogical, hysterical, ignorant, fatuous, "snobbish", in short pitiful as they are, they give us the true portrait of Demos, our lord and master. One has to read them.

D. Gilmour, The last leopard (1988, revised edition 2007), 46

Get off Comparative Literature: it doesn't help you to cope with life

I looked at him and very nearly said: Here are you teaching comparative literature, the big subtle stuff crammed with ambiguities, and you've been put in the situation of melodrama, very simple and crude, a teenage daughter turned into an unmarried mother and a wife distraught with the shame of it, yourself a sorrowing father. Get off Comparative Literature: it doesn't help you to cope with life

A. Burgess, Earthly Powers (1980), 593