Quotes About Literature

As a kid, I didn't drift into the comic world too much because I preferred to read fantasies novels and science fiction.

In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.

Regency literature was too coal-y for me, too long-winded and describey. I preferred modern books where you had to read other books explaining what the first book meant to know what happened.

At one point in my life, I wanted to do a master's degree in Irish literature, but I ended up getting pregnant instead.

I never read a book before previewing it; it prejudices a man so.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

Freedom is the basic prerequisite for writing.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.

My mom gave me 'Anne of Green Gables' as a present so that was my first introduction to Anne, little did I know.

I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award. It wasn't the best kiss as far as kisses go, but I hold the fact that I kissed John Updike, that he kissed me, very close to my heart.

I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.

One Christmas I had no money, and so I went home and just, like, wrote a poem; I mean, I didn't write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like, 'Here's a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you.'

As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.

It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts.

Raised in a house filled with old books, I'm drawn to them: the dust jackets that call out a historical moment, the marbled boards, the words pressed into the page with movable type.

Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.

When you are what we call a 'minority writer,' a writer of color, a writer of any kind of difference, there is some kind of presumption of autobiography in everything you produce. And I find that really maddening, and I resist that.

It feels presumptuous to think of writing for adults.

We're so willing to dehumanize entire populations in order for us to conveniently go along with our lives. We know exactly one North Korean, for example. The rest of them, we don't know - but it makes it very easy to bomb North Korea if we pretend they're all one person. Literature makes it harder to dehumanize people in this way.

There was a moment when designers draped in ermine would be reading Proust, or pretending to.

If you take away a lot of the pretension and grandness from Shakespeare, a true poeticism is revealed.

I was a pretentious child. I grew up without a television. I read a lot of books and I loved Shakespeare. Still do.