Quotes About Literature

But if a book is tedious to you, don't read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness

Un buon lettore è raro quanto un bravo scrittore.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

A classic book is a book which generations of men, driven by various reasons, read with that same initial fervor and that same mysterious loyalty.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

The indecipherable dust, once Shakespeare.

Desvario laborioso e empobrecedor é o de compor vastos livros; o de espraiar por quinhentas páginas uma ideia cuja perfeita exposição oral cabe em poucos minutos.

Cilv?ku nekas nesp?j main?t. M?ž?g?s atsauces uz gr?matu gudr?b?m.

Hladik had rounded forty. Aside from a few friendships and many habits, the problematic exercise of literature constituted his life, Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Quain soleva ripetere che i lettori sono una specie ormai estinta. Non v'é europeo - ragiovana, - che non sia uno scrittore, in potenza o in atto. Affermava anche che, tra le diverse felicitá che puó procurare la letteratura, la piú alta é l'invenzione.

Un gran libro como la Divina Comedia no es el aislado o azaroso capricho de un individuo; muchos hombres y muchas generaciones tendieron hacia él. Investigar sus precursores no es incurrir en una miserable tarea de carácter jurídico o policial; es indagar los movimientos, los tanteos, las aventuras, las vislumbres y las premoniciones del espíritu humano.

I think of myself as being essentially a reader. I have ventured into writing, but I think what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes—yet one writes not what one would like to write but what one is able to write.

Omettere sempre una parola, ricorrere a metafore inette e a perifrasi evidenti, é forse il modo piú enfatico di indicarla.

In the critic's vocabulary, the word precursor is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary.

Todo libro tiene una línea que lo salva

The world unfortunately is real and I, unfortunately, am Borges

If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning than the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world. Your favourite books, reader, are like rough drafts of that book without a final reading. - Literary Pleasure

Before I ever wrote a single line, I knew, in some mysterious and therefore unequivocal way, that I was destined for literature. What I didn't realize at first is that besides being destined to be a reader, I was also destined to be a writer, and I don't think one is less important than the other.

La gloria di un poeta dipende, in definitiva, dall'eccitazione o dall'apatia delle generazioni di uomini sconosciuti che la mettono alla prova, nella solitudine delle loro biblioteche. Le emozioni che la letteratura suscita sono forse eterne, ma i mezzi devono variare costantemente, anche solo in modo leggerissimo, affinché essa non perda la sua virtù.

En una ocasión le pregunté a Alfonso Reyes por qué publicamos, y Reyes me contestó: «Publicamos para no tener que pasarnos la vida corrigiendo borradores».

No estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Soy todos los autores que he leído, toda la gente que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Todas las ciudades que he visitado, todos mis antepasados...».

Fuera de algunas amistades y de muchas costumbres, el problemático ejercicio de la literatura constituía su vida; como todo escritor, medía las virtudes de los otros por lo ejecutado por ellos y pedía que los otros lo midieran por lo que vislumbraba o planeaba.

Quain solía argumentar que los lectores eran una especie ya extinta.