Quotes About Literature

Anatole Broyard

What I brought to Dr. Schachtel was not a condition or a situation but a poetics. I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel. Of course, that's what all patients want, but the irony was that with me it might have worked. It might have been the shortest, or the only, way through my defenses, because I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.

I would define a book as a work of magic whence escape, all kinds of images to trouble the souls and change the hearts of men.

The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.

I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

Das Leben ist zu kurz und Proust zu lang...

What a lot of books!" she screamed. "And have you really read them all, Monsieur Bonnard?" "Alas! I have," I replied, "and that is just the reason that I do not know anything; for there is not a single one of those books which does not contradict some other book; so that by the time one has read them all one does not know what to think about anything. That is just my condition, Madame.

He would not stoop even to pick up the old manuscript I am going to seek with so much trouble and fatigue. And in truth man is made rather to eat ices than to pore over old texts.

Let us love the books which please us and cease to trouble ourselves about classifications and schools of literature.

The only exact knowledge there is, is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature's killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that's not the word.

Does our reading life balance or subvert our waking life?

The act of love and the act of poetry Are not compatible With the reading aloud of a newspaper

Los libros no valen más que en la medida en que nos enseñan a amar

Milagre da literatura, quando é verdadeira.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.

Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

La lectura de un buen libro es un diálogo incesante, en que el libro habla y el alma escucha.

Bueno-explicó-(¿Qué más desea el lector:¿Explicó?¿Contó?¿Dijo?¿Musitó?¿Interecedió?¿Requirió?¿Sibiló?, esta última palabra para enriquecer el conocido y monotonísimo axioma del fanfarrón y pseudovanguardista J.COrtázar. ¡Ah, los caminos sin fin de la vana literatura!)

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros's work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.