Quotes About Literature

The terrible thing about public school is they take young children who are natural poets and storytellers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk "about it".

In college in the late sixties, I read almost exclusively male writers, usually dead, from England and the rest of Europe. They were very far removed from my daily life, and though I loved them, none of them reflected my experience. I must have subconsciously surmised that writing was not within my ken. It never occurred to me to write, though I secretly wanted to marry a poet.

Walking home from work that night, I stopped in the Centicore Bookstore on State Street and wandered up and down the aisles. I saw a thin volume of poetry entitled Fruits and Vegetables by Erica Jong. (Jong had not come out with her novel Fear of Flying yet and was still unknown.) The first poem I opened to in the book was about cooking an eggplant!

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

I'm actually reading 'World War Z' again! It's incredibly realistic and it's written as an oral history through interviews with different characters. Max Brooks wrote this book in so many different voices. There are about forty or so. It's incredible. When I finish 'World War Z' I'm going to go back and start again on the 'Game of Thrones' series.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing second, the gratification of one's family and friends and lastly, the solid cash.

Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.

Words form the sinew and muscle that hold societies upright, he argued. Consider the Koran, the Bible, the American Constitution, but also letters from fathers to sons, last wills, blessings, curses. Thousands upon thousands of words infused with the full spectrum of emotions fill in the nooks and corners of human life.

I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.

it is not the first language that is all-important, but which language captures the adolescent's imagination when he or she first discovers literature.

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.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

To a degree that would be astonishing in the United States, Vietnamese in all walks of life could recite long passages from poems, recount folktales and legends, and discuss novels thirty years old as if the characters lived next door.

Hiller Wellman, a Springfield librarian

Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author