Quotes About Literature

there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found...

He worried about everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T. S. Eliot who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad hours to function as a poet.

am a journalist. But like all journalists I wish to write literature

There is no FRIEND as LOYAL as a BOOK!

There is no friend as long as a book

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.

And we're going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them.

I hope when I die, they won't put on my tombstone, 'He wrote Miss Jane Pittman .' Put anything else, but don't put just that.

My six words of advice to writers are: Read, read, read, write, write, write.

ich aufrichtender Mensch und noch nicht ausdeterminierte reale Möglichkeit, das sind für die Entwicklung unseres Lebens, unserer Literatur, Philosophie, Praxis sicher die unabdingbarsten Kategorien.

Die Rache der Sprache ist das Gedicht

Todo libro ha de hacer pedazos el silencio.

It's our job to transform literature into an event. We do this with why and how. Why our character speaks and how our character speaks.

She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.

I'm a great reader that never has time to read.

I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other

For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

Henry James said there isn't any difference between the English novel and the American novel since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.

Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. ...I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them...

The art that speaks [truth] most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.