Quotes About Literature

Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful.

O reverend Chaucere, rose of rethoris all,As in oure tong ane flour imperiall, That raise in Britane evir, quho redis rycht,Thou beris of makaris the triumph riall.

Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own

As for the immediate importance of the study of ambiguity, it would be easy enough to take up an alarmist attitude, and say that the English language needs nursing by the analyst very badly indeed. Always rich and dishevelled, it is fast becoming very rich and dishevelled…

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books — even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can

It has been suggested that an army of monkeys might be trained to pound typewriters at random in the hope that ultimately great works of literature would be produced. Using a coin for the same purpose may save feeding and training expenses and free the monkeys for other monkey business.

In literary composition a well-chosen quotation lights up the page like a fine engraving...

...the curious hunter-up of rare quotations... the young and struggling scribbler...

I really prefer books. No matter how bad a book is, it's unique, but people are all so ordinary. —I think we really like books that make us hate ourselves.

Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.

For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first.

In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights, of a mind of uncommon excellence.

When I was your age, television was called books.

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.

Not only is it not necessary to read "Interview With the Vampire" by Anne Rice before you die, it is also probably not necessary to read it even if, like Lestat, you are never going to die. If I were mortally ill, and a well-meaning friend pressed Anaïs Nin's "Delta of Venus" into my trembling hands, I would probably leave this world with a curse on my lips.

It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.

The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes.