Quotes About Literature

Books and marriage go ill together.

I think coldness is chic among writers, and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad.

People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!

All the Jane Austen in the library cannot wash the Queens from this little hand.

T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind.

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.

Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters.

Others beside Jane Austen have made their Eltons, though none quite so cooly as she.

Charlotte Palmer is no sillier than Harriet Smith; and yet, how intolerable we should find it to see and hear as much of Charlotte as we do of Harriet! And would Miss Bates have been endurable if she had been presented in the mood and manners of Sense and Sensibility?

I suspect that Jane Austen's practice of denying herself the aid of figurative language which, as much as any of her other habits of expression, repelled Charlotte Brontë, and has alienated other readers, conscious with a dissatisfaction with her style that they have not cared to analyse.

For he was their Victor Hugo. And his Paris, the Paris of Esmeralda and Jean Valjean, would live forever.

Le Figaro's Albert Wolff,

In his Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust would model his Baron de Charlus on Montesquiou, just as he would base the Princess Yourbeletieff and Madame Verdurin on Misia, the actress Berma on Sarah Bernhardt, and elements of the character of Bergotte on Prince Edmond de Polignac (although more on Anatole France).

Every word she [Lillian Hellman] writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." (on Lillian Hellman)

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of preliminary, said, 'Is it a queer book?' 'No,' said Laurie. 'Oh,' said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went away.

I like to read because it kills me.

It looks like it's wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company

I still bought many books, but more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.

There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the "friends" who inhabit them.