Quotes About Literature

She laughed and asked, "What if Shakespeare was just hitting keys?" "Shakespeare didn't have a typewriter," I said. "What if he was just making marks on paper? And that's how he came up with Macbeth?" "I doubt it. Maybe Measure for Measure. I could see that with Measure for Measure. Not Macbeth.

Read. Always read. No one can take that away from you.

I don't think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what's the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.

The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race.

That attraction force which always happens between the reader and the book, i adore it when it takes place <3

Reading is one of the important part of being a person.

Epigrams succeed where epics fail.

It is now 55 years since my last book report, which is a long time to live with a guilty conscience. So here it is: In the spring of 1956 I wrote a highly favorable review of the Bible without reading a word of it, and it was the last A I ever got in English. Why it has taken so long to come clean I'm not sure, except I have always been extremely sensitive about my academic reputation.

She quotes Robert Louis Stevenson about how young writers must read like predators. And she says that all of us, not just writers, must read like predators. For books are food, she said, for every single one of us.

The great novel of twentieth-century New York might be the Daily News.

It was held that the six great arts – visual art (including architecture and photography), drama, dance, music, film and literature – form a family of related, if largely autonomous, practices: they all work through the aesthetic, all address the imagination, and all are concerned with the symbolic embodiment of human meaning.

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in for ever.

paraphrasing it. Secondly, his approach to literature is overwhelmingly moral; its purpose is to teach us about life, to transmit humane

I regard posterity as vulgar as success. I don't trust posterity. I don't think what's good is necessarily recognized in the long run. Too many good writers have disappeared.

One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, Have a nice day.

Cognitive psychologists have confirmed what we already knew: that readers of complex novels show a greater capacity for understanding the complexities of human interaction.8

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.

Only to read their letters, notes and poems, not to see them smiling … They distilled their wisdom in writing, not in prizes … For a kind of heavenly sense made clear, for an hour, deep inside us: That's why we read the wise.

I met a man at a party. He said "I'm writing a novel" I said "Oh really? Neither am I.

I hope that as a totally literate human being that you don't even know what "illiteracy" is because it simply doesn't exist in your world.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.