Literary Merit Quotations

The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.

There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

...book-buyers aren't attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel: book-buyers want a good story...something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.