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Literature Quotes
"We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle."
39
"Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
37
"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."
35
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
33
"Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England."
32
"The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness."
29
"The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside into the narrow balcony."
24
"The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics."
21
"Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving."
20
"A book is a gift you can open again and again."
16
"I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works."
14
"I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them."
11
"Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose."
11
"Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the 'language of Shakespeare'... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ..."
11
"A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug."
10
"Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words."
10
"The nastiest kind of writer is a ghostwriter, who bears people's children in their body for money."
10
"A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."
10
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
9
"Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire."
9
"Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds."
9
"To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour."
9
"The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own."
9
"There are literary works that speak for themselves and there are writers who boast through work."
8
"Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?"
8
"All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one."
8
"One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real."
8
"The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us."
8
"Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men."
8
"Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it."
8
"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."
8
"I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available."
7
"Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore."
7
"Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature."
7
"I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great."
7
"Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion."
7
"You can quiz me on Petrarch, Medea, Shakespeare or Dante, I know them all, and I'm sorry, but they've all gone wrong. Dumb glorified men, writing words about love and life as if they knew. As far as I'm concerned, they didn't make it out alive either, so I'm sure as hell not going to go to them for advice."
7
"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting."
7
"Every man's memory is his private literature."
7
"When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap."
7
"Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone."
6
"All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand."
6
"That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer."
6
"There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery."
6
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
6
"The synopsis looked good, the cover looked nice, you opened the book and began a new life. You found a new home, you met some new friends, you kept on reading, hoping it ould never end. You danced through the pages, you sang out the words you felt all their joy, and all their pain and hurt. The pages cut your fingers, and the words cut your heart, like the author had a knife, and was tearing your soul apart. You laughed with the characters, and with them, you cried, you fell in love with them, too but with them, you died, and when the book reached its end, and your broken heart couldn't heal, you suddenly realized that its not real."
6
"Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use."
6
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