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Literature Quotes
"The single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naA ve."
18
"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them."
18
"This book's like black holes. It really engulfes you whole."
18
"I wanted a library like this...[] A cave of words that I'd made myself."
18
"Let the readers do some of the work themselves."
18
"If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."
18
"A book is as private and consensual as sex."
18
"Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved."
18
"The association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the "nursery," as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused."
18
"It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology."
18
“As a rule of thumb, I'd say one cliché per [Romance]--and then be damn sure you can make it work. But if you're going to try to write the virginal amnesiac twin disguised as a boy mistaken for the mother (or father depending how well the disguise works) of a secret baby, honey, you better have some serious skills. Or seek therapy.”
18
"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."
18
"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!"
18
"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."
18
"All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result of work accomplished by the human spirit, no matter what the material facts that may have stimulated it (a walk, a night of love, a social drama), of a sort of discovery in the world of the spirit, of the emotions, made by the human intelligence, so that the value of a book is never in the material presented by the writer, but in the nature of the operation he performs upon it."
18
"It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction."
18
"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."
18
"The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence."
18
"To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient."
18
"Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships..."
18
"Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars."
18
"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."
18
"What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!"
18
"As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective."
18
"Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board."
18
"That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us."
18
"The story was told, generation by generation, in song and in story, until time misted it into myth and legend. But some believed, as legends brought comfort."
17
"It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was."
17
"I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility."
17
"It is not all books that are as dull as their readers."
17
"All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone."
17
"We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something."
17
"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
17
"We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it."
17
"Science fiction is out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!"
17
"Poets, you always write about women worth dying for. Write, for a change, something about the ones worth living for!"
17
"We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
17
"I can't bear literary snobbery."
17
"Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think. That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless."
17
"Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it."
17
"Poetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's."
17
"Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different."
17
"There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it."
17
"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"
17
"To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you."
17
"I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde."
17
"But these people _announced_ their madness . . . they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it."
17
"Even the pool of ink could be dried out and writing papers could be burnt to ashes forever but the spoken word will never die so as the editor."
17
"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."
17
"Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating."
17
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