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Literature Quotes
"The fact that at the moment the distinction is being made, a young adult, as opposed to an adult, is the one reading it. In other words, I don't entirely believe in the distinction. A great book is a great book, and it's impossible to say what part of a person is going to connect to it."
12
"The Mole had long wanted to make the I acquaintance of the Badger. He seemed, by all accounts, to be such an important personage and, though rarely visible, to make his unseen influence felt by everybody about the place."
12
"Dialogues must appear as natural as if coming from effortless writing. It must not sweat. Your beloved readers must not sweat. But here am I, literally sweating, because my characters are literally talking dirty in a steamy sweaty and bloody scene."
12
"What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past."
12
"This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession."
12
"Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep."
12
"SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible."
12
"Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?"
12
"A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?"
12
"I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans."
12
"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."
12
"Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
12
"You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer."
12
"The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said."
12
"By a route obscure and lonelyHaunted by ill angels only,Where an eidolon, named NIGHT,On a black throne reigns upright,I have reached these lands but newlyFrom an ultimate dim Thule --From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime,Out of SPACE, out of TIME."
12
"In literary history generation follows generation in a rage."
12
"There are literary works that speak for themselves and there are writers who boast through work."
11
"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."
11
"In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other."
11
"Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody."
11
"I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts."
11
"There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves."
11
"A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature."
11
"What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?"
11
"The key to this collaboration - which we undertook after much deliberation - was to stretch creatively. New characters, new locales, new form (the novella)."
11
"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."
11
"Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors."
11
"We were alone. Where, I could not say, hardly imagine. All was black, and such a dense black that, after some minutes, my eyes had not been able to discern even the faintest glimmer."
11
"A book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life."
11
"Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo."
11
"Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it."
11
"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."
11
"I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else."
11
"Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you're trying to do is to always extend that, to push that out."
11
"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."
11
"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."
11
"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."
11
"I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak."
11
"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."
11
"And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international."
11
"Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American."
10
"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."
10
"Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate."
10
"In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75."
10
"Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature."
10
"I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there."
10
"There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery."
10
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