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Literature Quotes
"If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble."
13
"Teen problem novels? I can go through them like a box of chocolates. And there are fantasy books out now that need a lot more editing. Fantasy got to be so popular that people began to think 'We don't need to be as diligent with the razor blade,' but they do."
13
"I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you."
13
"About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong."
13
"All kinds of magic are out of date and done away with, except in India, where nothing changes in spite of the shiny, top-scum stuff that people call 'civilization."
13
"Tell me of your Willoughbys, Heathcliffs and Wickhams in literature and I will tell you I met them all."
13
"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."
13
"I love Shakespeare, but sometimes....his images - If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head...."
13
"Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town ---- anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful."
13
"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."
13
"Pages entertain me more than pictures do."
13
"As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today."
13
"Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot."
13
"I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn't like it, and he says to her, "I already know about human beings."
13
"This place looks like the last scene in Hamlet."
13
"Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity."
13
"I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific."
13
"It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."
13
"There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others."
13
"Science fiction" means different things to different people. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra"-in which case the term science fiction has piled up a lot of expensive overtime."
13
"Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person."
13
"This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit..."
13
"Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying."
13
"The great novels are deterrents. A Merck's manual on how not to live."
13
"No, no, it's not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."
13
"Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws."
13
"Books are really places, make no mistake about that."
13
"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."
13
"Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior."
13
"I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden--very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain--full of balsam and tang--I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully--I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one--it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake."
13
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
13
"Oh literature is a wonderful thing, Varenka, a very wonderful thing: I discovered that from being with those people the day before yesterday. It is a profound thing. It strengthens people's hearts and instructs them, Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror; it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document."
13
"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
13
"The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name."
13
"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."
13
"Literature is map of humanity, the documenter of civilization. Books introduce us to the landscape of the greatest minds of every century."
13
"The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the."
13
"A story has to break your heart or it's not worth telling."
13
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
13
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
12
"Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor."
12
"I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas."
12
"One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters."
12
"Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content."
12
"I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious."
12
"Never read a book to finish it, read to consume it."
12
"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."
12
"Books require titles reading them doesn't."
12
"Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future."
12
"I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was."
12
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