Quotes About Literature

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.

he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.

You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me.

You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that is what my mother made me.

I read some good books that summer, along with a great many bad ones, and I liked them all. Off in my own retreat and my own world

Frank Harris' My Life and Loves.

cat in A Christmas Carol, and peering

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the maturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.

I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of Uncle Tom's Children. When the review of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awful naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.

Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality. --Richard Wright to William Faulkner

George Washington Cable in the nineteenth century and, in Wright's own time, William Faulkner.

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.

The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different. And for me, everything was something different. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.

Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards.

THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD!!!!

To all my librarian friends, champions of books, true magicians in the House of Life. Without you, this writer would be lost in the Dust.

And of course I'm in the press all the time. So many books have been written about me; Into thin air, up in the air,Gone with the wind-

She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

Now that the war looked as if it was going to last forever Ursula had decided she might as well embark on Proust.

Knowing that when light is gone, Love remains for shining,' " Dr. Hunter said. "Isn't that lovely? Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it for her dog." "Flush," Reggie said. "Virginia Woolf wrote a book about him.

by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds I've discovered so far).

This is Martin Canning, Neil. He's written a wonderful book." "Fantastic," Neil Winters said, shaking Martin's hand. His hand was damp and soft and made Martin think of something dead you might pick up on the beach. "The first of many, I