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Literature Quotes
"But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No."
10
"They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
10
"Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song."
10
"An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better."
10
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."
9
"As far as now I can tell that most Stephen King fans don't know him well. They have read or viewed few works and their judge is based on them... that's now well knowing a writer!"
9
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
9
"I wasn't discriminating in my reading, and I'm still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I'm not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading - the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story - and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the "message" first, you might as well give up, it's too much like all work and no play."
9
"Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic."
9
"I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. FaA«rie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold."
9
"I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother."
9
"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
9
"In describing a fairy story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: 'this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty'. But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that begun thus: 'this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy'; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate."
9
"The lot of the brideto be wed before beddesired until rotten.The lot of the authorto be read before bedadmired then forgotten."
9
"Stephen King and Clive Barker can make amazing works, such people's book should be on your list."
9
"Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence, many epic tales are pretty much epic crap."
9
"Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score."
9
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
9
"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read."
8
"A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers."
8
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
8
"Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description."
8
"The sacred-souls of authors are displayed in the beauty of their books."
8
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
7
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