A Quote by Madame de Stael

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society.

Madame de Stael

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Literature Society Taste Ton

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Madame de Stael
French - Writer
April 22, 1766 - July 14, 1817

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Susan Sontag

I'm being trained to shake the bon-bon appropriately.

Clay Aiken

Thai society rarely attempts to control literature in the same way that it vigilantly polices visual art. It's ironic because people in this society are more aware of literature than they are of art.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all.

Madame de Stael

If we wish to unfold the mind in our children we do not leave them to their own uncultivated taste in all these things, but we try to help them to train that taste, whether it be in art, in music or in literature.

Charles Webster Leadbeater

For the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one's personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time.

Ford Madox Ford

As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.

Cao Yu

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

Richard Rodriguez

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

Marcel Duchamp

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

Irvine Welsh

I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

Fernando Pessoa

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

Lionel Trilling

I have to say, 'Pod' was a bon-bon, a treat to myself. A treat to write: a happy, pleasurable write.

Douglas Coupland

Without society, and a society to our taste, men are never contented.

Thomas Jefferson

I think that when you are accused of being in bad taste it can be quite positive. You're challenging the notions of polite society. I'd like to put across the notion that bad taste is actually good for you.

Margaret Cho

A Quote by Madame de Stael

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