Quotes About Literature

You devour a book meant to be read, not because you would fill yourself or have an anxious care to be nourished, but because it contains such stuff as it makes the mind hungry to look upon. Neither do you read it to kill time, but to lengthen time, rather, adding to its natural usury by living the more abundantly while it lasts, joining another's life and thought to your own.

I once stole a pornographic book that was printed in braille. I used to rub the dirty parts.

No, no, I'm a lowbrow. I read [Dostoevsky] more out of obligation than enjoyment. For enjoyment, for me, it's a beer and the football game.

There is nothing contemptible about an intoxicated man (if it is nothing more than a bookful of words or a roomful of notes that he has got drunk on).

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

To leap over the wall of self, to look through another's eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers.

What a splendid piece of furniture an armchair is, of utmost importance and usefulness to a contemplative man. During those long winter evenings, it is often sweet and always advisable to stretch out luxuriously in one, far from the din of crowds. A good fire, a few books, some quills - what excellent antidotes to boredom!

Mi biblioteca, ya que es preciso decíroslo, se compone de novelas... sí, de novelas... y de algunos poetas escogidos. Como si no tuviese bastante con mis propios males, comparto aún voluntariamente los de mil personajes imaginarios, y los siento tan vivamente como los míos.

Literary revolution and revolutionary literature did not create a beautiful new world but instead divested literature of its basic nature, promoted violence, and, by resorting to linguistic violence, made a battlefield of this domain of spiritual freedom.

Everybody is wearing a mask. It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

If literature is to transcend political interference and return to being a testimony of man and his existential predicament, it needs first to break away from ideology. To be without "isms," is to return to the individual and to return to viewing the world through the eyes of the writer, an individual who relies on his own perceptions and does not act as a spokesman for the people. The people already have rulers and election campaigners speaking in their name.

To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.

In my view the time for rousing revolutionary literature has passed, because the revolution has already revolutionised itself to death and has left behind only bitterness and a sort of weariness, listlessness and even nausea.

When I came overseas, I realized that there are many ideologies and many trends, and it's also very hard to produce honest art and honest literature. I decided that I didn't want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because that's also a kind of pressure that doesn't allow absolute freedom. So I decided that I was only going to produce works that were satisfactory to me, and that meant not following any trends and being anti-ideological.

Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.

Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.

No matter how revolutionary people were, he said, they could not live without books. Without books, we would not understand the world; without books, we could not develop; without books, nature could not serve humanity.

Few people here have any need of novels

Sarashina Nikki

People are always saying the humanities are dead so it's strange how many conferences there are.

Paperback novelettes with faded covers still bore coffee stains and greasy fingerprints from their first readers. The books can never forget their readers, though the readers have no doubt forgotten all about the books' contents.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

Le livre n'est qu'un miroir. Il nous renvoie à ce que nous sommes. C'est pour cela qu'un livre est adoré par certains et vomi par d'autres. Chacun y trouve sa part de sensibilité, sa part d'humanité. Le livre fait partie du rêve et le rêve est le père de tous les espoirs.

fasciné par les mots... ces assemblages de caractères morts qui, pris entre une majuscule et un point, ressuscitaient d'un coup, devenaient phrases, devenaient foules, devenaient force et esprit. Tout