Quotes About Literature

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever.

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

I feel happy and secure when I'm on my bed with a good book... I forget everything which is terrible in our world.

I always advise children who ask me for tips on being a writer to read as much as they possibly can. Jane Austen gave a young friend the same advice, so I'm in good company there.

At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.

I certainly don't condemn anyone who listens to audiobooks. It seems to me that any way we get good literature in our brain is worthwhile.

We need literature because we wouldn't fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

A mediocre mind thinks it writes divinely; a good mind thinks it writes reasonably.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored

It's a very good historical book about history.

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all.

Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

If it's a good book, anyone will read it. I'm totally unashamed about still reading things I loved in my childhood.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

Good reading makes for damn hard writing.

Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.

I'll tell you what I was like as a child. I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader.