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Literature Quotes
"The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems of the spirit."
3
"Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it."
3
"I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers " there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader."
3
"Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems."
3
"I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel."
3
"Pay to go inside Neruda's homeA body lies there with no dome.But right there in the front hallLean a fairy against the icy wall.Oh Endless enigmas had the bard!Nice and large and calm backyardEnds In the middle of a rare roomRare portrait of revelishing gloom.Up climbing at the weird snail stairDoes make you grasp for some air.And there's a room with bric-a-brac:Old and precious books all in a pack.Dare saying what I liked most of all?Enjoyed seeing visitors having a ball!"
3
"Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain - the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed - then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood."
3
"I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable."
3
"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self."
3
"Each story provides a beginning, a middle and an end, the trick is, never seperate them through the chapters or you'll miss the meaning of the entire book."
3
"Macaulay is well for awhile but one wouldn't live under Niagara."
3
"All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed."
3
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
3
"Darkling I listen; and, for many a timeI have been half in love with easeful Death,Call'd him soft names in many a musA d rhyme,To take into the air my quiet breath."
3
"The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence."
3
"I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren't easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all."
3
"The difference between reading a good book and Facebook, is that a good book is always hard to put down, whereas on Facebook it's become too easy to put anyone down."
3
"The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible."
3
"Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence, many epic tales are pretty much epic crap."
3
"For a storyteller, an open ending leaves much room for imagination; for the inquisitive reader, however, it is a source of great anxiety."
3
"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read."
3
"With a book, you're guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it's one of the few advantages books still have."
3
"The historian records, but the novelist creates."
3
"While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best."
3
"Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves, when she ran in the Pack and was not called The Demon for compliment's sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death. So he backed out of the cave mouth growling..."
3
"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
3
"H.G. Wells said that his method was "to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds." Such prestidigitation is a characteristic ploy of science fiction: to make a nonexistent entity or impossible premise acceptable (often by scientific-sounding terms such as telepathy, extraterrestrial, cavorite, FTL speed) and then follow through with a genuinely realistic, logically coherent description of the effects and implica."
3
"People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way."
3
"When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book."
3
"Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up."
3
"Human beings have their great chance in the novel."
3
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."
3
"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."
3
"We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it."
3
"If books are not good company, where shall I find it?"
3
"I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come."
3
"The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows."
3
"Here we have a baby. It is composed of a bald head and a pair of lungs."
3
"I have a book of poetry I believe many should read but in each verse you'll discover it wasn't written for greed."
3
"Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human."
3
"Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever."
3
"He was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn."
3
"As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective."
3
"Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer."
3
"Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood."
3
"-As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females." -"I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere."
3
"That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us."
3
"I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me."
3
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