Quotes About Literature

Classic? - a book which people praise and don't read.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book.

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

The Bible is the funniest book I have ever read. It's so funny! Right in the first six pages, it's funny!

He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.

I prefer dead writers because you don't run into them at parties.

This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn't take on any other terms.

The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

The biggest critics of my books are the people who never read them.

Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.

Shakespeare - it's not funny. No matter how they try to make Shakespeare funny, when it's meant to be funny it's not funny.

You know it's them books what make you talk funny.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.

The funny thing in France is that writers are not allowed to retire, because the French government say you are still earning money from books you wrote 20 years ago.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

I wrote a few children's books... not on purpose.