Quotes About Literature

All I have learned, I have learned from books.

L]iterature is always badly served when an author's artistic insight yields place to stereotype and malice. -Home and Exile

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

sometimes crazy uncles—from Samuel Johnson to G. K. Chesterton.

Theory sometimes seems to me a way of taking revenge on literature—the critic masters the text and rewrites it in his own image, instead of submitting to it and listening to what it has to say. The aggressive ungainliness of so much academic writing about literature is a sign of this—it is unliterary writing about literature, which should be a contradiction in terms.

Had J.D. Salinger known who John Hinckley and mark David Chapman were before they bought his books or took them out of the library? Would it have mattered if he had? Had he returned the royalties he received from those purchases?

for which he had to pay "1 panegyrick poem every year." That is Homeric rent.

say, 'There never was such a person as Homer,'" the English essayist Thomas De Quincey joked in 1841.

Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, and people think he was good, right ? Didn't write any decent characters, as far as I can tell, but otherwise fine.

Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, and people think he was good, right? Didn't write any decent girl characters, as far as I can tell, but otherwise fine. The

Walks all ass straw.' 'I beg your pardon?' 'The car. A classic. Ass-straw translates as star, I believe.

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten'?" He laughed again. "Racine has his moments, sure, but you can't beat Shakespeare for the really grisly stuff.

I am a beau only in my books.

Come la vita, la letteratura è vissuta in avanti e compresa a ritroso.

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.

The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book. A wee paperback to stick in your pocket.

Bad prose is the bugbear of genre fiction.

By Hades, I wish Goodreads.com would make it mandatory to cite the literary source in quotes.

You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--

I cannot live without reading.

Comparisons have been made with Stirner, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Camus, to name only a few.3 He won tributes from Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, who acknowledged his formative influence on their work in both content and style.

Because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back into our world.

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.