Quotes About Literature

On Monday I received a letter from Golden Days, a Philadelphia juvenile, accepting a short story I had sent there and enclosing a cheque for five dollars. It was the first money my pen had ever earned; I did not squander it in riotous living, neither did I invest it in necessary boots and gloves. I went up town and bought five volumes of poetry with it -- Tennyson, Byron, Milton, Longfellow, Whittier. I wanted something I could keep for ever in memory of having arrived.

Several pages omitted. Anne's pen being evidently neither sharp, stub nor rusty.)

Prose, rightly written and read, is sometimes as beautiful as poetry.

Notre bibliothèque n'est pas très fournie mais chacun des livres qu'elle contient est un ami.

It was nearly as long as a minister's and so poetical.

1906 Anne of Green Gables is rejected by four publishers. Montgomery puts the manuscript away in a hatbox.

I am simply a book drunkard.

Allan thinks it is a proper book for a girl thirteen and three-quarters to read.

I love books. I hope when I grow up to be able to have lots of them.

There is only one realm in which characters defy natural laws and remain the same—the realm of bad writing. And its the fixed nature of the characters which makes the writing bad. If a character in a short story, novel, or play occupies the same position at the end as the one he did at the beginning, that story, novel, or play is bad.

the novel is a vicious attack on the guiding ideology of the party – Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.

I read this book for the first time in almost ten years to prepare this introduction. On one level I am pleased to see that it holds up. On another level, I was appalled. I found myself wondering if the current administration had read it and used it as an instruction manual.

I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night-spoken by Woodrow Call

i'd hate to read all these books...that much reading could put your eyes out.

Bernard Berenson once said that the formation of the great library he assembled at I Tatti was his greatest achievement. I feel much the same way about the library (as distinct from the bookshop) that I've put together in Archer City. The collection—or, more properly, the accumulation—now numbers about 28,000 volumes. If I were beamed up tomorrow my library would attest to the fact that a reader had once been there. -- On Rereading, NYRB July 14, 2005

If you mean Miss Austen, I don't find her particularly romantic, Tasmin declared. Can't say that I care much about the marriage arrangements among the middle classes. Tasmin Berrybender

I'm a fastidious bookman and have never liked reading books with library markings or other messy defects.

There can be secondary and tertiary reasons for wanting a particular book. One is the pleasure of holding the physical book itself: savoring the type, the binding, the book's feel and heft. All these things can be enjoyed apart from literature, which some, but not all, books contain.

He was embarked, at the time, on a book sighing—I insist, sighing, not signing, though he's pretty adept at that too.

It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.

Harry Kane used a word your publisher will cut.

You might find it helpful to read the works of Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson. The hallmark of a truly great philosopher is that he never writes books on philosophy, and those two are the best. Anderson for how to get along with people who are conspicuously wrong, and Heinlein for when not to.

My first addiction was to books. -B. Chelsea Adams

Und alles hatte den leichten Schimmelduft, den Bücher im mittleren Texas haben. Zuviel Feuchtigkeit. Zuviel Wärme. Ein Land, das niemals imstande sein wird, Bücher längere Zeit aufzubewahren. Bücher halten sich hier nicht. Sie schimmeln. (Die Sache mit dem Hund)