Quotes About Literature

I don't think I've ever read a food piece or a food book.

The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.

Books were my pass to personal freedom.

If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.

I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom,' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Books + friendship = book club

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!

There was a poor poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff, But the public, though dull, Had not such a skull As belonged to believers in Clough.

Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.

Puns are the highest form of literature.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathingthey are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

People joked that Forster became more renowned with every book he did not write.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

We read to know we are not alone.

If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free