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Literature Quotes
"The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers."
51
"What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature."
51
"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."
51
"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."
51
"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
50
"He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
50
"A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug."
50
"Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors."
50
"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."
50
"All good Literature rests primarily on insight."
50
"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."
50
"To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time."
50
"The story appeared, then faded."
50
"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold."
50
"Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning."
50
"We all knew the book well because it's the cult book in Latin America. For me, this was a sacred territory. I would not have ventured into it by myself."
50
"Good stories are like those noble wild animals that make their home in hidden spots, and you must often settle down at the entrance of the caves and woods and lie in wait for them a long time."
50
"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."
50
"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."
49
"I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis."
49
"I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out."
49
"Great writers are the saints for the godless."
49
"I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off."
49
"First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so."
49
"Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile."
49
"The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said."
49
"If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays."
48
"In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal."
48
"Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."
48
"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."
48
"I am made of words. Cut me & I bleed sentences. Read me, & I speak to your soul."
48
"The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible."
48
"The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have."
48
"Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost."
48
"Literature doesn't exactly have a strong mental-health track record."
48
"The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander."
47
"For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page."
47
"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."
47
"SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible."
47
"As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths."
47
"He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else."
47
"However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it."
47
"Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives."
47
"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."
47
"Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present."
46
"In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75."
46
"Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written."
46
"A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature."
46
"I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large."
46
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