Quotes About Literature

I think it's really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' doesn't count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you're young does not count as an exposure to fantasy?

Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I'm not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience.

Up to 1870, it was equally said of France and of Italy that they possessed no folk-tales. Yet, within fifteen years from that date, over 1000 tales had been collected in each country.

The brothers Grimm were indeed once read by millions of people - quite often the first reading materials given to people in the 1950s were their tales.

If you find yourself caring about old stories and regret the ways in which they slip out of reach of young audiences, you may well conjure up the means to put these tales into young peoples imaginations.

Conservatives don't want to read good, smart books. They mostly want to read Fox and talk radio hosts writing about presidents.

Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.

I don't make any notes, but I do know where to find things. Suppose I need to know where Wexford first talked about his love of the countryside or where he quotes Larkin or what was the beginning of his hatred of racism or where he first encountered domestic violence; I would be able to find it straight away.

When I was a kid, I read many of my mom's books. Sometimes, there were mysteries, but there were no delineations, and my mother never talked about book genres. Nor did we differentiate genres in school.

Thanks to the Jolabokaflod, books still matter in Iceland; they get read and talked about. Excitement fills the air. Every reading is crowded; every print run is sold.

We were a family of incredible talkers, readers, arguers.

When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

I remember talking to John Mortimer, and he said he was relying on Rumpole to keep him in his old age; well, I'm doing the same with Phryne - she's my mainstay.

I'm an active author: I travel to give readings and talks, although I know it's risky.

I have always been an obsessive reader - I remember going back and forth to the local library with stacks of books taller than I was.

Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.

The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation..

We are what we read -- and the power of books to transform the minds and personalities of their readers can give cause for anxiety as well as for celebration.

It's a tiny bestseller, but, officially yes. But, hey, most people haven't read Moby-Dick, so why the hell should they read my book?

I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart.

O, there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come.

We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island.' Walt Disney.