Quotes About Literature

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

No writer can really sustain two huge - I hate the word 'franchises.'

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don't have to push it!

Don't be scared of 'said.' Writers sometimes go looking for alternatives because they worry that 'he said' and 'she said' will feel repetitive if they're used all the time, but I swear, they won't.

I briefly considered doing Edgar Allan Poe and just swearing a lot.

It doesn't excite me as a writer to write some swearing or sex scenes, because they don't have any emotional content.

There are 195 crime books published in Sweden every year. You could cut that to 100 and keep the good ones.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

To realise belatedly that there are Swahili epic poems which rival their European equivalents for sweep and power has been exciting.

My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel - and all the rest has been a sweet bonus.

It's not all 'Jane Eyre' out there. In her sweet, honorable, slightly passive-aggressive way, Jane was as perfect as a protagonist can get while remaining interesting; in fact, she's one of my favorites. But most characters are more morally ambiguous.

I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. 'This Side of Paradise' - that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays - I felt like he'd written the book just for me.

I thought I was too intellectual to read something like 'Sweet Savage Love.'

'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle.' It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.

Quite out of proportion to the size of the country, British children's writers swept the world in the 20th century. We should celebrate them.

The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.

To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.

I meditate - very pretentious - and I try to read as much as I can and swim at the Y.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

I never read gossip press. I just read books. And I never switch on the TV anymore.

I'm reading a lot of different books, but I always think I have to switch it up a little bit. It's like food - everything in moderation, same with my books, same with my reading. You read books that are good for you and you learn a lot of stuff, then you read 'Fifty Shades of Grey,' which is like candy.