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"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
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"We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
Author Name
Personal Development
"They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
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Personal Development
"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."
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Personal Development
"Pages entertain me more than pictures do."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
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Personal Development
"People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them."
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"I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars."
Family
"The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define."
Friendship
"The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal."
Society
"Nonsense and beauty have close connections."
Beauty
"For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and-by some sad, strange irony-it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy."
Relationship
"Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life."
Life
"I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends."
Friendship
"Our life on earth is and ought to be material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly they are still entangled with the desire for ownership."
Philosophy
"Mr. Herriton, don't " please, Mr. Herriton " a dentist. His father's a dentist. Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die."
Society
"How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"
Philosophy
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