top of page
.png){kind=small}
Literature Quotes
"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
8
"I love stories with a happy ending, Inspector Me said."
8
"Literature is the immortality of speech."
8
"No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem."
8
"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."
8
"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
8
"The synopsis looked good, the cover looked nice, you opened the book and began a new life. You found a new home, you met some new friends, you kept on reading, hoping it ould never end. You danced through the pages, you sang out the words you felt all their joy, and all their pain and hurt. The pages cut your fingers, and the words cut your heart, like the author had a knife, and was tearing your soul apart. You laughed with the characters, and with them, you cried, you fell in love with them, too but with them, you died, and when the book reached its end, and your broken heart couldn't heal, you suddenly realized that its not real."
8
"Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar."
8
"Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew."
8
"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."
8
"There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing."
8
"In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature."
8
"There's nothing like a printed book; the weight, the woody scent, the feel, the look."
8
"People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not.""Shouldn't the storyteller believe it.""The storyteller should tell it."
8
"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering."
8
"I am made of words. When you cut me, I bleed sentences. When you read me, I speak to your soul."
8
"In a novel, you'll find yourself in a world of possibilities. You'll find shelter there."
8
"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."
8
"Only in a novel are all things given full play."
8
"For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all."
8
"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
8
"I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives."
8
"Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained."
8
"The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel."
8
"In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality."
7
"Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple."
7
"The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around? "Darling, what do you mean? "There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay." How? By being stupid?"
7
"A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins."
7
"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
7
"The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future."
7
"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history - true or feigned - with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."
7
"The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape."
7
"Books may well be the only true magic."
7
"Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts."
7
"The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up."
7
"Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!"
7
"Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told."
7
"I love the smell of book ink in the morning."
7
"What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that."
7
"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."
7
"Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary."
7
"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."
7
"Good fiction creates its own reality."
7
"Nothing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature."
7
"My books are water, those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water."
7
"You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God."
7
"Write what you want to write. That's the only advice a writer will ever need."
7
bottom of page