Literary Tradition Quotes

“In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon

“And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets, listening – to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second badd and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, bassos profundos. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I learned a little of beauty – enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth – and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventual death of every literary tradition…”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned