Quotes About Literature

The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.

The Victorian era produced more Victorian writers than any other period in history.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

Of course I loved books more than people.

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.

I hold Petrarch at leastly partly responsible for the disconcerting gap between Italian's written and spoken vocabularies. The

Fawn M. Brodie, whose classic life of Smith earned her excommunication from the Mormon Church, saw the Book of Mormon as 'one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions'.105 There was quite a genre of 'lost race' novels at the time. A century on, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga formed an English Catholic parallel, conscious or unconscious, to Smith's work.

I thought it was amazing to work with authors, to get a manuscript and try to make up a cover for it.

Book lover n. 1. A person devoted to reading 2. One who would rather stay inside and read than go outside and play. 3. Someone who gets lost in a story and loves to dream with open eyes. Beware: never disturb a book lover when he/she is reading. Results can be fatal.

Unfortunately I'm not on the same wavelength as Maria yet in the literary sphere. She writes me such good, natural letters, but she reads…Rilke, Bergengruen, Binding, Wiechert; I regard the last three as being below our level and the first as being decidedly unhealthy.

A preface is usually an excrescence on a good book, and a vain apology for a worthless one;

Così una pagina lentamente si volta, si distende dalla parte opposta, aggiungendosi alle altre già finite, per ora è solamente uno strato sottile, quelle che rimangono da leggere sono in confronto un mucchio inesauribile. Ma è pur sempre un'altra pagina consumata, signor tenente, una porzione di vita.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

All great literature is about longing. The same is true with music. People can buy anything they want or need at the mall or on line. But they cannot buy what they long for. That is where writers come in. We deliver what people long for.

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If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

It's about ten times the size of the Bible — and unlike the Bible, contains no good news.

Becketts work is an embarrassment to the Void.