Quotes About Literature

Her books, and some inner source of life, had kept her warm.

I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the 'Letters,'" said Mrs. Touchett. "It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots — her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn't care; who couldn't have cared. I don't mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a keyhole.

As the popularity of science-fiction increases, so inevitably does the volume of clownish imprecation against it.

At this rate, he felt, he might even live to see the day when novelists described their characters by some other device than that of manoeuvring them into examining themselves in mirrors.

the task of instilling Wordsworthian metaphysics into the barren intellects of the Modern Lower Fifth

Roosevelt followed it8 with a quirky essay in The Outlook entitled "Dante and the Bowery," arguing that literary stylists had grown too precious in eschewing contemporary imagery. There was as much epic grandeur and poignant example to be found in modern life, he suggested, as there was in Greek myth, or for that matter, thirteenth-century cosmology.

Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy.

So many novelists of our time eschew any "message," as if it's an aesthetic flaw. Maybe critics want to preserve our self-defeatingly clamorous culture by making sure no radical idea actually gets through and can be heard.

America was, alas, a country of great eccentrics and great prudes, of great writers and few readers.

Gide was the tutelary god of my adolescence, and I immersed myself in his work. He wasn't a very good role model, since he made it clear that he was a pedophile, not a homosexual, and genuinely immoral.

Reading books for pleasure, of course, is the greatest joy. No need to underline, press on, try out mentally summarizing or evaluating phrases. One is free to read as a child reads—no duties, no goals, no responsibilities, no clock ticking: pure rapture.

Critics always praise precision in writing, and some great writers (Joyce, Beckett, Gustave Flaubert) are masters of clarity—but one of the great (and seldom mentioned) resources of fiction is vagueness.

I remember Ronald Firbank once said, upon entering a bookshop, something like, "Do you have anything in my line, you know, something dreamy and vague?

The French word for "plot," trame , also means "heft" or "weave.

Other writers, especially the ones you admire, can steer you to good books.

Whitman believed himself, at the time when Drum-Taps was published, that it was so far the best thing he had written. It certainly contained the best poetry that was written during the war on the subject

classic (though one that I cannot help thinking a little overrated), and there is no point in describing her poetry here.

THE Canadian Morley Callaghan, at one time well known in the United States, is today perhaps the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world.

AUTHORS SHOULD BE READ BUT NOT SEEN; RARELY ARE THEY A WINSOME SIGHT.

I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.

Two or three people had gone to Limerick and bought 'The Country Girls.' The parish priest asked them to hand in the books, which they did, and he burnt them on the grounds of the church.

Another d-mn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?

The great work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for The

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation.