Quotes About Literature

That whole idea of chick lit being a thing that you just lump all the commercial female writers into - it went on for years.I'd switch on the radio, and I'd hear, 'Two female authors are here to discuss chick lit - is it dead?' and I'd think, 'Argh, no, not again. Are we seriously still having this conversation?'

The pen is mightier than the sword, and is considerably easier to write with.

'Ancillary Sword' picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.

I remember that feeling when I was a young reader: finding books that were set in Sydney with Australian characters was incredibly exciting.

The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: 'lane' rhymes with 'pain,' but it also rhymes with 'urbane' since the last syllable of 'urbane' is stressed. 'Lane' does not rhyme with 'methane.'

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

I always loved Flannery O'Conner, and how she's not trying to create sympathetic characters.

Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

I have an obsession with books about kids with Asperger's syndrome.

When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.

I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I am interested in the highbrow/lowbrow synthesis. My sensibility, I am proud to say, is middlebrow.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.

Much as there are things about our own life stories that we can learn only from the systematic study of our dreams, there are things about the human condition that we can learn only from a systematic study of literature.

Because the writer has done her job, the world of the book I am reading has become, for the moment at least, more real than the world at my elbow. Books this good should carry a warning: Your quiche might burn, your child might escape his playpen, the morning glory vine might strangle your roses, and you'll never know.

Eliot was scornful of idle women readers who imagined themselves the heroines of French novels, and of self-regarding folk who saw themselves in the most admirable character in a novel, and she hoped for more nuanced engagement from her own readers. Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience.

I could understand the impulse to make the novel more accessible. I want as many people as possible to read The Mill on the Floss too. But like paperback editions of classic novels issued with updated covers resembling those of Twilight , it seemed a pandering and misbegotten effort, as if no young reader today might possibly pick up a novel written one hundred and fifty years ago unless the book were in sexy neo-Gothic drag.

A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book.

Many of the books on my list are, in my opinion, amazing. Some I didn't like. But I give them all five stars, because stars make people - including me -- happy.

Sidda can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves the black letters marching across the white pages...

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

A.A. Greg argues, 'To print banquet for banket, fathom for fadom, lantern for lanthorn, murder for murther, mushroom for mushrump, orphan for orphant, perfect for parfit, portcullis for perculace, wreck for wrack, and so on, and so on, is sheer perversion.' Greg is considered by most scholars to be a majer dikhed.