Quotes About Literature

I don't think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don't think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish.

I certainly think I'll end up writing about America in some form. I've taken plenty of notes. I like America very much.

I bristle at the implication that only with the help of a Big Six editor does a novel lose its self-indulgent aspects. Before the advent of self-publishing, there were plenty of self-indulgent novels on the shelves.

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

I was so fortunate to be raised in a household filled with books and - as you might imagine to be the case in the Bush home - plenty of conversation.

What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.

Sometimes I'll feel down and realise it's because of a depressing plot.

I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn't have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.

I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.

Certain writers look down their noses at plot, and I think I might have been one of them until I tried it.

Plot is to literature what individual holes are to miniature golf.

I don't give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don't need them, but a lot of authors do.

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.

I hate plots.

Reading is so private, and it is often a reader's habit to finish a book, close the covers, and plunge into the next one without a backward glance.

I was a member of Corstorphine Library in Edinburgh, and every Friday night, my parents took me there to borrow books. I also used to spend nearly all my pocket money on books.

If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?

People are transported to that space that Poe wanted to make available to us.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe.

I grew up on Edgar Allen Poe, and I loved Alfred Hitchcock's movies.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.