Quotes About Literature

I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.'

War in Africa is hardly a new phenomenon, nor are voices telling its stories of terror and triumph. Yet some of the continent's most devastating conflicts - and the literature born from the experiences of their survivors - have often gone unnoticed in the West.

I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me.

I carried props into the subway - the latest 'Semlotext(e),' a hefty volume of the Frankfurt School - so that the employed would not get the wrong idea or, more to the point, the usual idea about me.

There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god's hammer.

On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

Many people know that Shakespeare's dramatic 'canon' was established in 1623 by the publication of the so-called First Folio. That hefty volume contained thirty-six plays.

My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.

I think that being read to every night is the reason why I was plowing through volume after volume of 'Nancy Drew' books all by myself by the time I reached the first grade. I loved stories. I loved the escape. I had a vivid imagination.

I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume.

In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.

When I first started editing a 'Year's Best' volume in the '70s, the job was pretty straightforward - there were three or four monthly magazines to read and a few original anthologies from trade publishers every year.

Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I've got a slim volume of work.

In terms of pure volume, I probably read more psychological mystery and historical true crime than anything else.

I like seeing my physical progress through a volume, particularly if it's a big book.

If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.

It is not a life at all. It is a reticence, in three volumes.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.

Sad to think that we won't have any new stories from John Updike, one of the last century's masters. But so many here in the two volumes of his collected stories, 186 by my count, stories to read, reread, savor over the course of a cold season. Updike's genius in the short form spills out of these many, many pages.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren's hands.

The most inspiring objects are books. I have about 5,000 volumes in my home library. It's an unending source of visuals and ideas.