Quotes About Literature

One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day."

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

I learned English by watching soaps as a kid, and since I don't have any formal education and can't teach at the universities like other literary writers do.

I grew up in an non-athletic family, where my parents were interested in music, in literature, in education and art.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted it is being formed.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level.

I think the book is less emotional than the film. With the film, the emotions are much more raw and in front. In the book, they are kind of ironized and seen through comedy.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives

The excellence of this important contribution to genre literature CANNOT be overstated A masterwork.

Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.

We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.

Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.

Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

But I like all the books. You've got to read them all to get the complete Harry Potter experience.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

My mom and dad were actors when they were younger and had a horrible experience of it. My dad became a literary agent and my mom a casting director.

Experience enables me to depose to the comfort and blessing that literature can prove in seasons of sickness and sorrow.

...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.