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Literature Quotes
"Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song."
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"An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better."
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"I read it a lot, whenever I find it in a library. Partly because I find new things every time I read it, but also because these BOOKS are always there for me. All of them are there for me. My life changes all the time, but books don't change. My reading of them changes-I can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you've been before, and it welcomes you back."
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"What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!"
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"A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give."
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"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack."
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"The sacred-souls of authors are displayed in the beauty of their books."
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"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
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"I hate to lend a book I love it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me."
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"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
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"The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation."
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"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
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"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I 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; Now more than ever seems it rich to die,To cease upon the midnight with no pain,While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!"
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"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."
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"This book is the book you have just read. It's done."
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"The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it."
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"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
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"I often like to enjoy the beauty of a beautiful book."
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"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
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"That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms."
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"Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content."
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"I had rather be hissed for a good verse than applauded for a bad one."
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"I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious."
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"Storytelling keeps life going."
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"The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction."
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"I read to know the past, I write to express my love for the future."
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"Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the SA vres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediAval painting."
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"He blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spare it as it went down to its resting place amidst the distant hills."
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"They say a story loses something with each telling."
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"This is Winter," said Scarlet. "Princess Winter."Thorne guffawed and pushed a hand into his hair. "Are we running a boardinghouse for misplaced royalty around here, or what?"
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"Love in a hut with water and a crust Is - Love forgive us! - cinders ashes dust."
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"As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air."
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"Tell me of your Willoughbys, Heathcliffs and Wickhams in literature and I will tell you I met them all."
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"The prose, Robespierre said. "It's so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style."
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"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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"The burning point of paper was the moment where I knew that I would have to remember this. Because people would have to remember books, if other people burn them or forget them. We will commit them to memory. We will be come them. We become authors. We become their books."
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"It's not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds."
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"Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on."
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"Drama copies life in there being a sense of waiting, of a promise never fulfilled."
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"These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination."
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"I think sometimes in literature we kind of police ourselves. I know a lot of people talked about Twilight, and they would say, oh, but the heroine, she lets this man make her decisions. And I thought, that may not be the particular fantasy or trope that works for me.But listen man, I read Wuthering Heights. I wanted me a little Heathcliff action. I mean, why can't we indulge that fantasy and also be like, "And now I would like the ERA passed, please. Also, this lipstick is fuckin' killer."
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"In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home."
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"The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands."
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"I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe."
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"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."
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"I have good reason to be content,for thank God I can read andperhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths."
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"Anything from Kipling."
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"More modern poetry is written than read."
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"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
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