Quotes About Literature

...as one reads more and more and more you get more fathers in your hierarchy of fathers. And then, after summoning twenty or thirty fathers, perhaps you are born, or perhaps you are not born.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Fragments are the only forms I trust.

The aim of literature," Baskerville replied grandly, "is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

had been happy to play the part of a Brontë heroine if it meant she wouldn't have to learn how to cook.

And every year, Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer.

Otherwise we attend to our poets when they are alive—to hear them, to praise them, to despise them, to use them. Death usually removes them. I expect my immortality to expire six minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game.

In the eighties and nineties, a New England monthly named Yankee paid me $4,000 four times a year, each time for an essay of a thousand words. Playboy paid an enormous sum in 1975 for my essay "Fathers Playing Catch with Sons," and Reader's Digest reprinted it. In the new century, fees have considerably lessened. A few years ago, a diminished Playboy printed three new essays of mine, and the three stipends together amounted to less than 1975's single check.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

A room without books is like a life without meaning.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.

To be able to talk to your heart's content about a book you like with someone who feels the same way about it is one of the greatest joys that life can offer.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Life is too short to read a bad book.

Literature has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts.

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.

The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.

I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to literature and theory. I wish I could have more of that in life, but I don't because I'm always reading scripts or things to prepare for movies when I'm reading.

I want to do something important in my life, and I think that adding beauty to the world with books... really is important.

How a big majority of book critics and authors have come to believe and to teach that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life, God knows.