Quotes About Literature

If we read Dickinson's letters looking for action in the usual sense—where she traveled, what chores she did, whom she encountered—we find some details for reconstructing her days, but not many. But if we read the letters for what the poet thought, her interior world opens.

Librarians, too, are gatekeepers -- not of actual experience, of course, but of its written accounts. My job is to safeguard those accounts. Not to judge them; simply to see to their proper dissemination.

My mom and I used to listen to records, read, and take train rides across the country in the summer. It was a very chill life. She didn't expose me to anything that was ahead of my development, but she expected me to adjust to her world - she did not expect to adjust to mine.

I was raised to respect books - the house was full of them. From the time I was little, it was drummed into our heads that books were almost the most important thing in the world, second only to getting a good education.

I could feel ART metaphorically clutch its function.

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.

Well, my father [Kingsley Amis] was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet.

I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books.

I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books. They contain the condensed experiences of humanity. To live fully, one has to read widely.

In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally don't know how to read them.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

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For Marc, books were objects of beauty, to be loved, not just read.

The very first detective fiction, written by Edgar Allan Poe, may have been set in Paris, but the book usually described as the first detective novel was Charles Warren Adams's The Notting Hill Mystery, republished recently by the British Library.

He loved the smell and feel of old books. To hold them was to touch the past.

Readers came and went, only the books stayed forever.

Seldom happier than when I'm on my own, lost in a book.

She says I ought to throw out at least two books for every one I buy. I had new bookshelves put up in the cottage after moving in, but already the to-be-read pile is mounting on to floor of the spare room.

Done to death by books? There were worse ways to go, even if you weren't a bibliophile.

An inscribed Casino Royale in a fine dust jacket costs as much as a small house. The earliest books of John le Carré are worth a king's ransom in fine condition.

Facts are not science - as dictionary is not literature.

book finally took shape. The contributions of Susan Ginsburg, my agent, are incalculable and very much appreciated

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.