Quotes About Literature

What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write... Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn't write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.

The last poem of the first group, beginning `O thou, my lovely boy', is not a strict sonnet, being a series of six rhyming pentameter couplets, as if the sonnet were entirely made up of conclusions.

I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject-- the difference between actuality and representation--was an interesting one. And that's what brought me to literature in the first place.

He liked to say that what makes literature is "inventing truly from honestly acquired knowledge, so that what you make up is truer than what you might remember.

If the first requirement of a civilisation is the possession of its own language, the second must be the pursuit of a literary tradition. Books are, in historian Barbara Tuchman's words, the carriers of civilisation.

The joy of reading with our children doesn't stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.

I'd never read anything like these texts, which taught me that literature demands concentration but pays you back in compound interest.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history. (In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III')

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

If there is a moral in this book, it is not my fault. If there is social relevance, it crept in without alerting me, in which case I would have hit it with a stick." (from preface to a later edition of the novel)

Books are the soft landing at the end of a bumpy day.

Plotinus had been born in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century A.D. Like many brilliant critics, he thought he understood what he had read better than the author himself.

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Every ironist has in mind a pretentious reader, mirror of himself.

The attentive reading of a book is really a continuous commentary, a succession of notes that emanate from the inner voice.

All classicism presupposes a romanticism that went before.

And all else is literature.

Nous sommes les Ingénues, Aux bandeaux plats, à l'œil bleu, Qui vivons, presque inconnues, Dans les romans qu'on lit peu.

The books are funny and sad, and that's what people respond to.