Quotes About Literature

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents in the school holidays, and the only books in the house were a copy of the Bible and Agatha Christie's 'Murder at the Vicarage.' I developed a taste for murder mysteries and then later discovered libraries, second-hand bookshops, and jumble sales.

I generally find fiction without some move to the weird, less imaginative, dull, prosaic. Not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. I suppose it's just a question of taste.

The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right?

I write for young people because I like them and because I think they are important. Children's books can be mind-stretchers and imagination-ticklers and builders of good taste in a way that adult books cannot, because young people usually come to books with more open minds. It's exciting to be able to contribute to that in a small way.

I'll always be reading a good book. I don't have, like, specific genre tastes or anything or things that I kind of get hooked on, reading genre books or anything like that. It's just really anything anyone kind of recommends or is going around or I hear is good.

Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes - from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels - and so it's a real honor that they've chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.

I'm omnivorous in my tastes, fiction and non-fiction, always several books on the go, though I'll read a novel in a day or two.

Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.

Here are a few of the actors who have brought my novels to TV life: Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand, Julian Sands, Gena Rowlands, Rob Lowe, Julia Ormond, Chelsea Hobbs, Tate Donovan, Anne Heche, Max Martini, Campbell Scott, Kimberly Paisley-Williams, Alexa Vega, and the late legends Richard Kiley and Kim Hunter.

One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.

Editing cannot be taught. Developing your own taste cannot be taught.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.

I believe kids shouldn't be taught Shakespeare. They should experience it first by seeing a great production.

It's like saying French shouldn't be taught because you don't understand it because it's new. Shakespeare is just like learning a new, exciting language.

I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something.

He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor.

Nothing in this life is certain aside from death, taxes and English literature graduates writing in the Guardian and spoiling your enjoyment of things you had previously thought were fine.

Another woman approached me while I was having lunch at the Russian Tea Room in New York and told me that the reason she had become a lawyer was because she had read 'Rage of Angels'. To me, that kind of feedback has more meaning than any sales figures.

Books teach children to see the world through the eyes of others and empathise with others. It's about the story.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.