Quotes About Literature

People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.

When Communism has been realized, everyone will be a novelist.

As a child who grew up in a grassy field, enjoying little formal education, I know virtually nothing about literary theories and have had to rely solely upon my own experiences and intuitive understanding of the world to write.

Tu sei un grande amico di Mo Yan e potresti suggerirgli questo espediente letterario: se, in un punto della trama, non si possiede una perfetta padronanza dei personaggi o un'adeguata tecnica espressiva, basta spingere tutti nell'acqua. In quel mondo il silenzio è più eloquente delle parole, è un elemento incolore più vivido dei colori stessi: per un momento lui dovrebbe far finta che l'azione si stia svolgendo sul fondo dell'acqua

Io mi immersi di colpo lasciandomi sopra la testa e dietro le spalle ogni suono, come farebbe un grande scrittore.

La belleza de la literatura reside en los malentendidos.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

She said in an interview with Polly Devlin in 1983 that the pseudonym was essential because, 'for a woman to read a book, let alone write one, was viewed with alarm; I would have been banned from every respectable house.

It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.

McGough: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've caught poetry. Mr Bones: Oh really? Well, don't worry, sir - I used to suffer from short stories. McGough: Really? When? Mr Bones: Oh, once upon a time ...

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.

When they tote up our contribution," Luke once said, "all that can be claimed for us is that we took 'fuck' out of the oral tradition and wrote it plain.

Books are like candy some can be sweet some can be sour, but no you cannot eat them

The romantic idealization of love and the beloved had no source in Roman or Germanic tradition. It came apparently from Islamic Spain, where women had a good deal of freedom and were often poets in their own right. It was there that a mystical doctrine of love as a holy passion, pure and uplifting, developed. Arabic literature is full of parted and thwarted lovers, totally faithful and devoted. Its poetry is mostly love poetry, foreshadowing the themes and styles of the French troubadours.

Ninety percent of our earliest examples of Latin classical writings are Carolingian copies.

Without external encouragement - which could sometimes become very strong - the world's literary and scholarly store would be scanty indeed. "Publish or perish" is nothing new; at the University of Bologna a professor was required to present his yearly disputation for publication and was heavily fined for dereliction.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores .

If dissociation, then, has been understood by psychopathologists to imply among other things 'loss of consciousness,' the question that immediately presents itself, or so one might think, is: what exactly is being lost--in other words, what is meant by consciousness? It turns out that it is exceedingly difficult to find an answer to this question in the psychiatric literature despite the seeming centrality of the issue.