Quotes About Literature

I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

I care about reading, a lot. It's a big part of my life.

I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one.

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

I am a writer who has written about the life of my people, the character of my people. What I can say is that the greatest hero of the Brazilian novel is the Brazilian people.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

Reading is the best return on investment. You have to live your entire life in order to know one life. But with reading you can know 1000s of people's lives for almost no cost. What a great return!

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.

In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined.

…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.

I curl up on my bed, propped against my pillows, books spread across the comforter. Since I stopped writing, I read more than ever. Other people's words, not my own—my words are gone. Right now, I'm into the Brontë sisters.

books spread across the comforter. Since I stopped writing, I read more than ever. Other people's words, not my own—my words are gone.

The first thing I learned from Judy Blume was that God is the wrong one to ask for bigger breasts. (Stephanie Lessing)

other children's stories were certainly unabashedly racist, too. Among the worst were the popular if unfortunately named series of Dumpy Books for Children, whose titles include the notorious Story of Little Black Sambo

They ushered in what became known as the golden age of children's literature, and remain classics today. As a child myself I felt like I should like them, because they were classics and I was pretentious, but something about them put me off.

Interestingly, the Llewelyn Davies boys were first cousins of gothic novelist Daphne du Maurier, whose own rather gothic childhood is a story in itself, and the reason du Maurier would not permit the publication of her childhood diaries until fifty years after her death.

Green Eggs and Ham. The book was not actually written to encourage fussy eaters to eat, but to make Seuss's editor Bennett Cerf eat his words. (Cerf had bet Seuss he couldn't write a book using fifty words or less.) Green Eggs and Ham hit it on the nail, and Geisel won fifty dollars, or would have, but Cerf never paid.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.