Quotes About Literature

Il y a des théories sur le rangement des livres. Notamment celle du bon voisinage. Le livre que l'on cherche n'est pas forcément celui que l'on doit lire. Il faut regarder celui d'à côté.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

Michael Swan-wick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction, short-shorts inspired by the periodic table of the elements.

those who care about literature and mind must know the Hebrew Bible, Donne, Sterne and Jane Austen, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Proust and Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and (of course) Shakespeare, to start.

superb group of mind-mindful novelists at work today: Philip Roth and Martin Amis, Cynthia Ozick, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Banville, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee—to start.

Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, Rick Bass's The Watch, Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, Charles Bowden's Red Line, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years, and Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness.

I'm not interested in teaching books by women... Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren't any women writers in the course. I say I don't love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

Real readers poison themselves with words. They close each book as though climbing, reborn, from a tomb.

but in the end, almost all this literature concentrates on the exchange of gifts, assuming that whenever one gives a gift, this act incurs a debt, and the recipient must eventually reciprocate in kind. Much as in the case of the great religions, the logic of the marketplace has insinuated itself even into the thinking of those who are most explicitly opposed to it.

In this brutal world of incessantly exploding sound effects, pubescent song lyrics and banal advertisements appealing to the lowest common denominator, the trick is to take refuge with the very small band of survivors who savor words like chocolates.

When the Associated Press picked up the story from local accounts, readers of The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other papers around the country learned how, just three years after the Second World War, American citizens were burning books.

Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation's literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

La suma de lo virtual y de lo postergado es la tenacidad de la escritura.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell deadborn from the press.

Tristram Shandy may perhaps go on a little longer, but we will not follow him. With all his drollery there is a sameness of extravagance which tires us. We have just a succession of Surprise, surprise, surprise.

I resolved to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvement of my talents in literature.

Her former suitor having been none other then Oscar Wilde, Florence had effectively captured the imaginations of the creators of Svengali, Dracula, and Dorian Gray. ... Rarely, if ever, has a woman been the focus of quite so much literary demonism.

Reading is a form of self-identification that works, paradoxically, by encouraging us to identify with others, an abstract process that changes us in the most concrete of ways.

Blomkvist had heard this line before. He had even spoken to an old lady who claimed that it was actually she who had written the Harry Potter books and that J. K. Rowling had stolen everything by telepathy.

What's wrong with Barbara Kingsolver?" Eva asked. "She is the embodiment of liberal piety at its most middlebrow and tendentious. Her novels are the beef ribs of fiction.

When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn't get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven't read yet. That's how I view that I'm rich. I have hardcover books I may never read.

Bible consists of sixty-six books written by some forty different authors over a period of about 1,500 years. The authors came from every imaginable background—"kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen and scholars. It was written on at least three different continents in three different languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—yet, there is a thread of continuity from Genesis to Revelation.