Quotes About Literature

Classicism is health, romanticisim is sickness.

People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believe that tragedy is romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believe it ironically.

I definitely fell in love with Dracula when I was 13. I found it so fascinating and so dark and romantic.

When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.

There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.

Who do readers expect to see when they pick up this book? Who has won the Most Troubled Romantic Lead at the BookWorld Awards seventy-seven times in a row? Me. All me.

I suppose it was a romantic was to perish... for a mouse

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

The Enlightenment needs more shadow; the Romantic Movement less.

Was there ever such thing as great Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you — what — was there not sad stuff?

When we read, even if the characters are tragic or sad or disturbing, these are our brothers and sisters in the human family.

Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.

This collection of Japanese fairy tales is the outcome of a suggestion made to me indirectly through a friend by Mr. Andrew Lang. They have been translated from the modern version written by Sadanami Sanjin. These stories are not literal translations, and though the Japanese story and all quaint Japanese expressions have been faithfully preserved, they have been told more with the view to interest young readers of the West than the technical student of folk-lore.

At all times, among my friends, both young and old, English or American, I have always found eager listeners to the beautiful legends and fairy tales of Japan, and in telling them I have also found that they were still unknown to the vast majority, and this has encouraged me to write them for the children of the West. Y. T. O. Tokio, 1908.

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought. ("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")

The whole of life, in all its complexity and beauty, has been etched into the gold of words.

Was it not I who populated with them all these pages—just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?' ("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer... ("Letter To Stalin")

But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. ("Letter To Stalin")

Harmful literature is more useful than useful literature, for it is antientropic, it is a means of combating calcification. ...It is utopian, absurd. ...It is right 150 years later.' -from 'On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters' as read in the introduction to Mirra Ginsburg's translation of 'We.

All of us and perhaps all of you read in childhood, while in school, that greatest of all monuments of ancient literature, the Official Railroad Guide.

Quem sabe como tu és? O homem é como os romances: só na última página é que se sabe o final