Quotes About Literature

Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française

It is my habit to buy cheap editions of old, obscure books and see what I can discover there. If the professors of literature knew the sources of my ideas, they would be astounded at the Philistine. But there is a greater pleasure in picking up a small pearl in an ash-can than in looking at a large one in a jeweler's window.

Freedom can still depend on ink, just as it always has.

The book was thick and red. It was almost thicker than it was wide, a thickness that somehow enhanced its bookishness. It was - to me aged 12 - quite clearly more of a book than most, if not all, of the paperbacks untidily stacked on the shelves of my father's study.

Don't try it," he said. The mutant was reading my mind. "You, boy, you're a literary trainspotter...

If you would ask my mom what books I liked growing up, I liked Dr. Seuss.

De Nederlandse literatuur wordt helaas niet alleen door de Nederlanders zelf voor onbeduidend gehouden.

Een boek is voor hem [C. Buddingh'] zo iets als een rommelwinkel voor andere koopjesjagers. Je vindt hier en daar wat moois, een aardig vaasje, een raar plaatje, maar de winkelvoorraad als geheel interesseert je geen zier. Zo leest Kees boeken. Hij pikt er zinnetjes uit, zoals een kind snot uit z'n neus peutert en smakelijk opeet, zonder te weten hoe het is ontstaan, zonder zich in de functie van slijmvliezen en de ademhaling te verdiepen, zonder iets te begrijpen van de totale mens, hè.

Over de Russische Biblioteek van van Oorschot): Het altijd rake feestgeschenk voor aftandse directeuren die afscheid nemen.

Er zijn twee soorten schrijvers. De eerste soort wil zich, zichzelf, rechtvaardigen als mens. De tweede soort wil zich rechtvaardigen als schrijver.

Literatuur is de neerslag of het verslag van een geestelijk avontuur in een taal die eigen, levend en origineel is.

He told Clarence S. Brigham, of the American Antiquarian Society, that he had begun translating Dante's "Inferno" before he was married and he liked it so well that he kept right on with it and finished it afterward.

And when a futurist dies, the tragedy is that we lose access to all the possible futures they imagined for us. Our only connection, afterward, is through the arcane procedure like literary interpretation, like reading the flight of birds or throwing the I Ching, as Ballard must have as a child in Shanghai. Like it or not, we live in one of Ballard's futures; a little apocalyptic, bent by technology.

Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nighTo learned Chaucer; and rare Beaumont, lieA little nearer Spenser; to make roomFor Shakespeare in your threefold fourfold tomb.

Books are weapons in the war of ideas.

I have often wondered how anyone who does not read, by which I mean daily, having some book going all the time, can make it through life.

Under bare Ben Bulben's headIn Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

And I may dine at journey's endWith Landor and with Donne.

Let's not get so ecstatic we ignore the fiscal situation. As my agent so delicately pointed out, most novels--providing they get published--net the author about enough for a new typewriter ribbon and a quart of tequila in which to drown his sorrows when he receives his royalty statement. You will find precious few novelists listed in Dun and Bradstreet.

He loved the way libraries smelled.

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.

I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.

Any book without a mistake in it has had too much money spent on it.

Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.