Quotes About Literature

I'm all about shrimpburgers, reading, and going to the beach.

I usually have about four books on the go - a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously.

As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.

Everything begins and ends with the writing.

I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.

One belongs to one's language as a writer.

I always felt once it goes into movie land, the book belongs to someone else.

books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.

While tentbound high on Everest, Mallory and his companions would read aloud to one another from Hamlet and King Lear

Missoula has a culture uniquely its own, however, thanks to the fusion of its gritty frontier heritage with the university's myriad impacts. UM has nationally distinguished programs in biology and ecology and is perhaps even more renowned for its literary bona fides. The faculty of the university's Creative Writing Program, founded in 1920, has included such influential authors as Richard Hugo, James Crumley, and William Kittredge.

Don't join the book burners," he said. "Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

I have, for instance, silently corrected Jefferson's frequent use of "it's" for "its" and "recieve" for "receive

As an adolescent, Vonnegut made my life bearable.

Okay, enough of that. If I keep writing in this emotional vein, Oprah might take notice of me

Benjamin had not dared, yet, to enquire about sales figures; as for the book's critical reception, it was non-existent. No reviews in either the national or local papers, of course, nothing on the various readers' websites and no reader reviews on Amazon - where it had a sales raking of 743,926 (or, if he wanted to cheer himself up, 493 in Bestsellers>Fiction>Literary Fiction>Autobiographical Fiction>Romance>Obsession).

In quanto a lei, sapeva anche di leggere più di quanto fosse sano, di riporre troppe aspettative nella lettura, di avere una sorta di ossessione nevrotica per la letteratura e i suoi presunti benefici sul piano morale.

Quello che in letteratura la gente chiama ironia, di solito nella vita vera si chiama dolore, incomprensione e disgrazia [...].

Nobody gives a tinker's fuck about fiction any more, not real fiction, and the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don't see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I'm very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

Essay's roots are in literature, and literature at its best invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.

I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn't share his particular faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in End Times.

What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?