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Literature Quotes
"When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape " into different countries, mores, speech patterns " but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic."
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"I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then."
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"Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature."
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"There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing."
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"I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer."
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"This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession."
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"All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."
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"Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?"
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"Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path."
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"Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing."
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"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
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"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!"
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"I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's so funny... I forgive him everything."
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"Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible."
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"A book that furnishes no quotations is no book - it is a plaything."
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"Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American."
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"Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive."
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"My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own."
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"The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history."
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"Stories don't always have happy endings."This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect."
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"In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities."
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"Books are readable drugs."
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"Every man's memory is his private literature."
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"Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart."
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"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."
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"She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions."
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"That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer."
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"I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets."
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"I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them."
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"There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural."
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"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."
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"When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it's being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn't have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing-maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world."
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"Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there."
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"My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language."
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"In the western part of England lived a gentleman of large fortune, whose name was Merton."
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"Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story."
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"The beauty of words that heals my soul."
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"OEDIPUS:O, O, O, they will all come,all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let melook upon you no more after today!I who first saw the light bred of a matchaccursed, and accursed in my livingwith them I lived with, cursed in my killing."
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"My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep - the 'unconscious.' It is nourishing, in ways we can't fully understand."
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"The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends."
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"Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?"
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"I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds."
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"Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away."
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"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."
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"And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature."
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"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."
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"I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal."
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"What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?"
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"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."
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