Quotes About Literature

Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap.

How well he's read, to reason against reading!

Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s.

It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors.

I'm not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

There's only one common element that united every writer I've admired... they're all incredibly well-read.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

I'm a pretty well-read person. I read my paper every morning.

I'm well-read as far as literary fiction, but I wanted to make better decisions about my writing, to use words or phrases more confidently by learning how your words can be interpreted, the shades of meaning, the different connotations.

I read 'On The Road' in college. I was 18 or 19, and I had a particular quarter where I was taking biology, calculus, and physics. Those were my three classes. It wasn't a well-rounded schedule at all. It was hard, hard work, all the time - hours and hours and hours of homework.

All the other characters are so well-rounded, and it's just frustrating because female characters aren't. It's not that they're badly written, they're just underwritten. They have no internal monologues; they could be absolutely anyone.

I have no objection to well-written romance, but I'd read enough of it to know that that's not what I had written. I also knew that if it was sold as romance I'd never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other literarily respectable newspaper - which is basically true, although the 'Washington Post' did get round to me eventually.

Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.

We still go to nonfiction for content. And if it's well-written, that's a bonus. But we don't often talk about the nonfiction work of art. That's what I'm very interested in.

It's so rare that you actually get to find a really well-written female lead.

There's a book called 'You're Not a Stranger Here' by Adam Haslett - short stories, a lot of them are about mental illness and gay people - that classic combination. But they're really well-written, really powerful. It's pretty good.

Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.