Quotes About Literature

Nadie puede leer dos mil libros. En los cuatro siglos que vivo no habré pasado de una media docena. Además no importa leer sino releer. La imprenta, ahora abolida, ha sido uno de los peores males del hombre, ya que tendió a multiplicar hasta el vértigo textos innecesarios.

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

I, that used to figure Paradise In the guise of a library

The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

As fate would have it, we talked about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. …

In spite of these three obstacles, Menard's fragmentary _Quixote_ is more subtle than Cervantes'.

I...confirm the fact - with a certain bittersweet melancholy - that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book.

Lo sucesivo del lenguaje indebidamente exagera los hechos que indicamos, ya que cada palabra abarca un lugar en la página y un instante en la mente del lector...

Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet?... these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.

Andere mögen sich der Bücher rühmen, die sie geschrieben haben, mein Ruhm sind die Bücher, die ich gelesen habe.

Little has happened to me in my lifetime, but I have read much.

De los diversos instrumentos inventados por el hombre, el más asombroso es el libro; todos los demás son extensiones de su cuerpo… Sólo el libro es una extensión de la imaginación y la memoria".

Yo he escrito también algunos cuentos en los cuales traté ambiciosa e inultimente de ser Kafka

A volte penso che i buoni lettori siano cigni ancor più tenebrosi e rari dei buoni autori.

Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men — those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.

El ejercicio de las letras es misterioso; lo que opinamos es efímero y opto por la tesis platónica de la Musa y no por la de Poe, que razonó, o fingió razonar, que la escritura de un poema es una operación de la inteligencia.

Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists.

La ya avanzada edad me ha enseñado la resignación de ser Borges

En mi época no había Best-Sellers y no podíamos prostituírnos. No había quien comprara nuestra prostitución.

Si vous traduisez Shakespeare, il faut traduire aussi librement que Shakespeare écrivait.

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. - Blindness

Each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I've not read more than half a dozen

I'm sorry to say that people have written fifty or sixty books about me. I haven't read a single one of them, since I know too much of the subject, and I'm sick and tired of it.