Quotes About Literature

Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

It occurred to me that I was on a run of suicides. Akutagawa. Dazai. Plath. Death by water, barbiturates, and carbon monoxide poisoning; three fingers of oblivion, outplaying everything.

Gregory [Corso] made lists of books for me to read, told me the best dictionary to own, encouraged and challenged me. Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.

Ve o an dü? gören herkesin kendi devirlerindekileri dü?ledi?ini geçirmi?tim akl?mdan. Antik Yunan uygarl??? kendi tanr?lar?n?n dü?lerini kurdu. Emily Brontë çorak arazilerin.

Do you want to be in our mob?" Elena asks him. "When did we get a mob?" he says. "We don't have one yet. I'm working on it." Michael turns to me. "It's got something to do with books." "In that case," says Michael, "I'm in.

Mark Twain made black people look like buffoons," [says Michael]. Mort doesn't look up. He doesn't know what we're talking about, but that doesn't stop him from joining the conversation. "Michael," says Mort, "Mark Twain made everybody look like buffoons. He was an equal opportunity buffoon maker.

It's true," says Michael. "Dicken's novels came out in monthly installments. People couldn't wait for the next chapter to arrive. Mobs would gather at train stations and shipyards so they could be first in line to get the next part of the book." "Mobs?" I say.... ..."People don't feel that way about books anymore," Elena says sadly. "Some people do," I say.

But in the book," I say, "the mockingbird is supposed to be a symbol of innocence. That's why it's a sin to kill one." "Who says it's a symbol of innocence?" asks Mort. "Teachers," I tell him. "Book reviewers, critics --" "Wikipedia," Elena calls from behind the window display.

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man's solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

Not to me," I said. Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby- Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any of that now?

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.

El único acto íntimo entre dos extraños que todavía es posible, es el de la lectura

Doch am Ende sind Bücher kein Luxus, sondern eine Notwendigkeit, und Lesen ist eine Sucht, von der er keinesfalls geheilt werden möchte.

They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough - to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

Leer por puro placer, por la hermosa quietud que te envuelve cuando resuenan en la cabeza las palabras de un autor.

A book is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy

knowing now that the job of writing was as much about removing words as adding them,

For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition.

Amare le parole, investire una parte di sé in quello che è scritto, credere nel potere dei libri: tutto ciò sommerge il resto, e al confronto la propria vita individuale diventa insignificante.