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Literature Quotes
"But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy."
20
"I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature."
20
"A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug."
20
"I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out."
20
"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."
20
"There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different."
20
"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting."
20
"The more 'life' a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story."
20
"And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor:And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted - nevermore!"
19
"All stories are true, Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean. He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. "More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere."
19
"He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
18
"In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal."
18
"Great writers are the saints for the godless."
18
"I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day."
18
"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."
18
"The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility."
18
"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."
17
"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 ..."
17
"Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of."
17
"The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers."
17
"A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early."
17
"Books, like people, can't be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them."
17
"After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?"
17
"I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes."
17
"So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!"
17
"I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets."
17
"Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about."
16
"All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one."
16
"Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American."
16
"He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor."
16
"In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal."
16
"Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there."
16
"Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."
16
"The beauty of words that heals my soul."
16
"This was like watching murder. Defilement. And it was something worse than either of those things. Even among his family, black trade as they were, books were holy things."
16
"You don't find the concept of illicit love at all engaging?"The concept, maybe. But in literature? That's like ordering a glass of tap water at a bar."
16
"Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire."
16
"The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries."
16
"My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose."
16
"I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another."
16
"Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart."
16
"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper."
16
"Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives."
16
"Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone."
15
"I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets."
15
"The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander."
15
"Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written."
15
"Tardiness in literature can make me nervous."
15
"Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility."
15
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