Quotes About Literature

Don't you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

He [Huxley] once explained that his aim as a novelist was 'to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay', arguing that the novel should be like a holdall, bursting with opinion and arresting ideas.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.

The great works of art and literature have a lot to say on how to tackle the concrete challenges of living, like how to escape the chains of public opinion, how to cope with grief or how to build loving friendships. Instead of organizing classes around academic concepts — 19th-century French literature — more could be organized around the concrete challenges students will face in the first decade after graduation.

trying to mold one's life around the heroic and deep souls one found in books. Day read as if her whole life depended upon it.

He read vividly.

The critic's aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and help readers appreciate it, by defining and analysing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of visions from which its beauties are visible. But many critics do not realize their function. They aim not to appreciate, but to judge; they seek first to draw lines about literature and then bully readers into accepting these laws.

If Sade's books are the kind which the French inelegantly describe as needing to be read with one hand, it is a sensible precaution to hold a sick-bowl in the other.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

So pathetic," he said, with a grunt. "So sad. Such a cliche. You can be so fond of cinema, of world literature, the classics, but then, when you find yourself playing out a classic scene, you don't feel ennobled, linked to that greatness. You feel...pathetic.

Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.

If you don't read books, and if you don't get consumed by the physical and moral life of men and women in fiction and history, too many facets of yourself may never come into being.

All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.

Although, through the vagaries of international politics, Athens became independent and democratic again soon afterwards, and continued for several generations to produce art, literature and philosophy, it was never again host to rapid, open-ended progress. It became unexceptional. Why? I guess that its optimism was gone.

If any city was a study in noir et blanc—be it black-and-white photography, film, or literature—Paris was it. The French versions of all three techniques were born during the Age of Romanticism. So was the concept of the daredevil avenger-antihero of the noir crime novel genre, the so-called polar, a Parisian specialty I learned to love.

Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories.

I write not for sensation, but for Truth. I leave judgement to the hearts of my good Readers everywhere.

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.' Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?' That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.

Seneca then suddenly changes the subject to talk about selecting and reading the right books, to discuss how "not wandering" is vital in reading also: "If you wish to take in something that will settle reliably in your mind," he says, "you must dwell with a few chosen thinkers and be nourished by their works. Someone who is everywhere is nowhere. Those who travel constantly end up with many acquaintances, but no real friends."7

Why the constant rereading? Is it not obvious? Firstly, reading and rereading distract him from thinking about himself, from enumerating the reasons behind his self-imposed predicament, from dwelling on his endless plight. Secondly, he rereads to remind himself what truly good writing is, how it formidably contrasts with what he published. Perhaps he'll finally learn something. To apply to what? To apply to nothing.

Now, between them, there was literature.

Alice aurait pu se retrouver dans le roman d'un grand écrivain tchèque, mais elle a préféré être dans ma vie.