Quotes About Literature

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.

In Charles Dickens's books I had to admire the way the meanest enemies spoke to each other, with what seemed to me to be the greatest civility.

Miss Finch said she meant to listen to new books as well as her old favorites, even the ones that pierced her heart, before she departed this world.

To remind us of the existence of others when we have fallen into the maze of interior, subjective life is one large part of the work of literature's windows. They keep us from stifling solipsism, by returning the personal self to connection with what is beyond it.

French-English

Taylor had been a book lover her entire life and, even at twenty-six, loved nothing more than curling up and getting lost in a great story, reading until the early hours of the morning. So what if it meant she never got enough sleep? Books were her life, her passion.

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.

Anglo-Saxon England had the richest tradition of written vernacular literature of any country in Europe, including a large body of original poetry and many translations of earlier Latin works.

There is a freedom born from the acknowledgement of greatness in literature, as if one gave away what one desired to keep, and in giving, there is a new space cleared for growth, an onrush of a new season beneath a secret sun. Acknowledging any great work of art is like being in love; one walks on air; any decline, destruction, death are within, not in the beloved; it is a falling in love with immortality, a freedom, a flight in paradise.

The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their characters assume in the books written about them.

Old writers never die, they just decom-prose!

Forget romantic fiction, a survey has found that most women would rather read a good book than go shopping, have sex, or sleep.

Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

Don't just read words,' he would tell her as he held up the latest story, 'devour them. Let the words create new worlds.

It's not like most people read anymore. Well, not unless the book has a wizard school or a hot vampire. And, as a Kari Kngsley expert, I'm absolutely certain your life has neither of those things.

They whisper: no little man from Customs and Immigration stands at the doors of memory or imagination demanding to see your passport. No arts bureaucrat or ComLit satrap can stamp OzLit, CanLit, FemLit, MigrantLit, or Displaced Person on your visa.

She says getting lost in a book is a magic trick, which means that I'm a wizard.

I've always been an avid reader. If I don't have a book in the car, I'll stop and pick one up just to have something to read. I don't even remember learning to read.

Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer got into a fistfight.

THE NOBEL PRIZE for Literature was given to Bob Dylan. The affirmation of Bob's talent was obvious and overdue. He was one of the twentieth century's literary masters, and this was the world's highest honor. No artist meant more to me.

Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they experience as desirable or even intimately necessary.

Today, the best-selling titles for blacks are in a genre most whites have never even heard of: "ghetto lit." This is the pulp-novel equivalent of rap music—books that glorify drugs, violence, hot sex, easy money, and the pimping life.