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Literature Quotes
"There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves."
34
"No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem."
34
"Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the 'language of Shakespeare'... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ..."
34
"Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate."
34
"There's nothing like a printed book; the weight, the woody scent, the feel, the look."
34
"No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books."
34
"Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions."
34
"I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets."
34
"I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various."
34
"Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore."
33
"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!"
33
"This is the funniest book I've ever held in my hands. --Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winning humorist and author says about Radical Sabbatical."
33
"The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective."
33
"Any time a beloved character is killed off, it affects the audience in a very powerful way, especially in a series."
33
"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."
33
"Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl."
33
"When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception."
33
"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."
32
"And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it."
32
"There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it's a very close relationship. We can do that because we're so small."
32
"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."
32
"Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest."
32
"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."
32
"First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him."
31
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
31
"Quotes are echos of voices transporting wisdom, humor, and love. Returning again to the human condition, fleeting once more as a dove."
31
"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering."
31
"Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own."
31
"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."
31
"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a musA d rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die,To cease upon the midnight with no pain,While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!"
31
"Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people's houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother."
31
"This book is so interesting. I always wonder what's going to happen next."
30
"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm - all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
30
"Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature."
30
"Mercy!" cried Gandalf. "If the giving of knowledge is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more should you like to know?""The names of all the stars, and of all living things, and the whole history of Middle-Earth and Over-heave and of the Sundering Seas," laughed Pippin. "Of course! What less?"
30
"Take my books away, and I should be desperate!"
30
"A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer."
30
"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."
30
"There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children."
30
"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification."
29
"Darkling I listen; and, for many a timeI have been half in love with easeful Death,Call'd him soft names in many a musA d rhyme,To take into the air my quiet breath."
29
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
29
"Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written, I'd rather boast about the ones I've read."
28
"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation."
28
"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."
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