Quotes About Literature

People don't like to say Fantasy they say Magic Realism which means Fantasy written by somebody I went to university with.

I read so I might live a thousand lives in a lifetime. I write to control the particulars in those lives.

Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading.

Like my father, I am very impatient. I have a strong bullshit detector. I may finish one book in twenty that I have started.

The worshipful father and first founder and embellisher of ornate eloquence in our English, I mean Master Geoffrey Chaucer.

My favorite of my books is DAVE AT NIGHT, because it's loosely based on my father's childhood in an orphanage.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

I've never read one book about my father.

hate has no literature: real fear and real hate have no words

There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.

I have also written a book about the Giving of the Torah, and a book on the Days of Awe, and a book on the books of Israel that have been written since the day the Torah was given to Israel.

My greatest fear is being somewhere without a book.

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread

I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.

Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. di..ens' characters are Nigerians. Do y

Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.

Life is too short for reading inferior books.

We miraculously become what we read. The mind is the sculptor of ones-self, amazingly creating the essence of who we are.

e chorei de alegria e confiança sobre as páginas do escritor como nos braços de um pai reencontrado." Marcel Proust, in: No caminho de Swann

precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.