Art & Creativity Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster’s line is a polite little knife, slipped between the ribs of literary reverence. It takes aim at a specific, very English temptation: mistaking effort for excellence. A long book asks for time, stamina, and a certain social performance of seriousness. Once you’ve paid that admission fee, it’s psychologically expensive to admit you didn’t enjoy the show. So you inflate the value to justify the hours you can’t get back. The praise isn’t for the book so much as for the reader’s endurance.

The subtext is about status. Length has long functioned as a proxy for importance, a way for culture to sort “major” works from mere entertainment. Forster pricks that hierarchy with a wry observation about how criticism can become self-congratulation: we applaud not the author’s achievement, but our own completion. It’s an early diagnosis of what we’d now call sunk-cost bias, delivered with the dry understatement of a novelist who understood social rituals as well as sentences.

Context matters, too. Forster wrote in a world where the “big novel” carried moral and intellectual prestige, and where reading was a marker of class formation. His own fiction is often slim, engineered for precision rather than bulk, attentive to how people dress up their motives to look principled. Here, he suggests that readers do the same with their tastes. The line doesn’t attack long books; it attacks the little lie we tell ourselves after finishing them: that the marathon itself proves the course was worth running.