Quotes About Literature

my between-books strategy of reading voraciously and promiscuously. What

the queen a copy of Henry Watson Fowler's famous 1926 guide to the English language, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

I'm a librarian," she said, "employed in the San Molinas library. For various reasons, I have never married. My position gives me at once an opportunity to cultivate a taste for the best in literature, and to learn something of character. I have nothing in common with the younger set who find alcoholic stimulation the necessary prerequisite to any attempt at conversation or enjoyment.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.

No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?

You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.

If you brought up Joyce twice, you would not be invited back.

For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her.

Los buenos libros se parecen en que son más ciertos que si hubiesen sucedido de verdad y en que, cuando terminas de leerlos, sientes que todo te sucedió y después, que todo te pertenece: lo bueno y lo malo, el éxtasis, el remordimiento y el dolor, la gente y los lugares y cómo estaba el tiempo.

Tell him I think writing is lousy, Bill said. Go on, tell him. Tell him I'm ashamed of being a writer.

There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!

I'm always reading books—as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you. Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

For we have been there in the books and out of the books—and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been. A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts

Easy reading is hard writing