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Literature Quotes
"American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous."
28
"The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her."
28
"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."
28
"Read good writing, and don't live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it's not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches."
28
"A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug."
27
"Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility."
27
"Great writers are the saints for the godless."
27
"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."
27
"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!"
27
"I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them."
26
"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."
26
"Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger."
26
"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."
26
"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."
26
"Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. ... Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men."
26
"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."
26
"Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over."
26
"However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it."
26
"Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives."
26
"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"
26
"Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it."
25
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
25
"The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe."
25
"After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?"
25
"A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study."
25
"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."
25
"An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else."
25
"Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censerSwung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor."Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee--Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore."
25
"He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
24
"Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree."
24
"My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language."
24
"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."
24
"What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature."
24
"It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much."
24
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
24
"The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form."
24
"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
23
"But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy."
23
"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."
23
"If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays."
23
"Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American."
23
"In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal."
23
"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."
23
"Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there."
23
"I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done."
23
"Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."
23
"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."
23
"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."
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