Quotes About Literature

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.

I don't think men experience the embargo on channeling the autobiography in their literature.

Racist writing is a craft failure.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

The first and almost the only Book deserving of universal attention is the Bible.

This helpful book on the role of the arts fills a significant gap in the growing literature on holistic faith-based programs.

To write for children at all is an act of faith.

I'm a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination.

There's no better place for hidden knowledge than in Books.

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets.

A thousand was the number Agamemnon's bards had started using; one thousand, one hundred and eighty-six didn't fit well in a line of verse.

Island of Lesbos

Humillar a las mujeres parece ser el pasatiempo predilecto de los poetas

his nose an aristocratic arrow.

Everyone probably thinks that I'm a raving nymphomaniac, that I have an insatiable sexual appetite, when the truth is I'd rather read a book.

I read everything, both serious and funny. Dickens, Thackeray, Rider Haggard, PG Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe, and the endless wailing of Virginia Woolf, thin terrible books where nothing happened.

The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it--whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.

Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!" Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther.

The Oblivion Seekers, a collection one critic has described as "one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world.

...she made her home in between the pages of books.

I can't write that dreadful hobbity stuff. I just simply... can't.

I hate Tolkien. I mean. Bloody pretentious escapist nonsense, isn't it?

Civilization -- a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.