Quotes About Literature

This room was our ivory tower, Sihem and mine. No one else was ever admitted here. Sometimes we'de come here to commune with our silence and reactivate our senses, dulled and blunted by the noises of every day. We'd bring a book or put on some music, and then we were off. We read Kafka as well as Khalil Gibran, and listened to Oum Kalthoum and Pavarotti with the same grattitude....

une grande bibliothéque en merisier investit toute une aile . C'était notre coin intime;notre retraite dorée. Nous y venions parfois communier avec nos silences et recycler nos sens émoussés par les bruits de tous les jours. Nous prenions un livre ou mettions une musique ,et nous voilà partis . Nous lisions aussi bien que Kafka que Khalil Gibran et écoutions avec la méme gratitude Oum Kalsoum et ou Pavarotti..

Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three—and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?

Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.

Trying to imagine E. M. Forster , who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce —to which in fact he was once taken. Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne —who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues.

I like Mr. Dickens' books much better than yours, Papa. Said one of Thackeray's daughters.

Or was it possibly...nothing more than a read ?

Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne?

I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them

The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It's just that they don't love me back.

she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

Of course you should study whatever you want. The written appreciation and understanding of literature, or any kind of artistic endeavour, is absolutely central to a decent society. Why d'you think books are the first things that the fascists burn?

But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her.

Brian: I love books Prof. Morrison: The contents of books, or just owning a whole load of books?

Printed books are dirt cheap, never run out of power and survive drops, spills and being run over. And their file format will still be readable 200 years from now.

Greg Bear, Alan Dean Foster, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle.

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation.

WHEN you are creeping through the literary underbrush hoping to bag a piece of humor with your net, nothing seems funny," Russell Baker wrote in a preface to an anthology of American humor that he compiled. "The thing works the other way around. Humor is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise." Yes