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Literature Quotes
"What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that."
38
"When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had."
38
"Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit."
38
"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."
38
"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."
38
"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."
38
"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."
38
"But I got through the review, for all their Latin and French; I did, and if you doubt me, you just look at the end of the great ledger, turn it upside down, and you'll find I've copied out all the fine words they said of you: 'careful observer,' 'strong nervous English,' 'rising philosopher.'Oh! I can nearly say it all off by heart, for many a time when I am frabbed by bad debts, or Osborne's bills, or moidered with accounts, I turn the ledger wrong way up, and smoke a pipe over it, while I read those pieces out of the review which speak about you, lad!"
38
"Write what you want to write. That's the only advice a writer will ever need."
38
"We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.God help us, for we knew the worst too young!from "Gentleman Rankers."
38
"You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer."
38
"But which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales."
38
"And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe."
38
"She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight A lovely Apparition sent To be a moment's ornament."
38
"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."
38
"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945."
38
"And please, stay away from those books you devour. They are putting the most fantastical tales into your head."
38
"All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand."
37
"Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft."
37
"Contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century."
37
"Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature."
37
"In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature."
37
"It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books."
37
"Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage."
37
"Books?' Ridley looked disgusted. 'Carry?"
37
"We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots."
37
"In literary history generation follows generation in a rage."
37
"I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?"
37
"Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country."
37
"This beast went to the well and drank, and the noise was in the beast's belly like unto the questing of thirty couple hounds, but all the while the beast drank there was no noise in the beast's belly."
36
"On the morrow the horizon was covered with clouds- a thick and impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily extended as far as the Rocky Mountains. It was a fatality!"
36
"Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts."
36
"All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool."
36
"We don't read to observe the character from a distance. We read to become the character and experience the conflicts and rewards they are experiencing."
36
"Beauty is nothing without brains & heart."
36
"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."
36
"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."
36
"The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter."
36
"What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is."
35
"The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate."
35
"The key to this collaboration - which we undertook after much deliberation - was to stretch creatively. New characters, new locales, new form (the novella)."
35
"The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind."
35
"The pages aren't numbered, so I don't know whether I have the beginning or end or whether it's in sequence but these days I'm not really looking for continuity.All I'm after is something that makes sense to me."
35
"The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read."
35
"Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend--but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately."
35
"I love books, they're in my blood."
35
"Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind."
35
"I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts."
34
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