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Literature Quotes
"Only in a novel are all things given full play."
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"Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions."
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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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"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."
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"Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
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"And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
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"In literary history generation follows generation in a rage."
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"I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?"
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"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."
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"Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without."
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"Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone."
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"I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five."
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"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."
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"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation."
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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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"The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse."
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"A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature."
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"Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive."
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"I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing."
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"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."
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"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."
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"There is in Albert Camus' literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear."
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"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
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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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"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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"Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire."
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"A book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life."
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"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."
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"I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans."
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"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."
17
"The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ' there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort."
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"The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti."
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"I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another."
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"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."
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"Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
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"Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country."
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"There are literary works that speak for themselves and there are writers who boast through work."
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"Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?"
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"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."
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"Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate."
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"I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts."
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"There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves."
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"I've been missing Japanese literature so much of late."
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"The key to this collaboration - which we undertook after much deliberation - was to stretch creatively. New characters, new locales, new form (the novella)."
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"Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature."
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"It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end."
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