Quotes About Literature

To remain pure a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

And the curious thing was that Dr Weis had never met anyone, man or woman, friend or colleague, who could stand literature when not on the page.

Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid, but the choice of a book presented some difficulties...

And the curious thing was that Dr Weiss had never met anyone, man or woman, friend or colleague, who could stand literature when not on the page.

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

Literature is the haven of fluidity, of slippage from one character to another, of movement. Women tend to read far more novels than men do, perhaps because this kind of ambiguous floating and flirtation is just what a self-protective masculinity needs to keep away from.

Lynda Johnson Robb: Children's books tie together the stages of life. You read them when you are eight or ten or twelve, and then they stay with you. I still have many books that I loved as a child and have kept; I read books to my own children; and now we will share books with my grandchildren. ...Children's books stabilize me, they are my roots; they help me in times of stress. They help me connect to happy memories, to those I love, to the generations in my family. They provide comfort.

Jack Pikulski: I learned... ...that children's books not only inform and entertain, but they make lasting impressions and add richness to our lives and the lives of those we love. While I am definitely into my mature years, I still read children's books; I always will.

Proust is even harsher on the same subject with the university professor Brichot. Like Françoise, Brichot never connects his reading to his inner life, and therefore fails to grasp the universal beauty and truth of certain texts. His being a professor of literature makes the posturing, petty criticism, and lack of insight particularly shocking.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect. In other words, if you were meeting all these people at a party you might have one frame of reference about them but once they were in a work of literature you might find, much to your surprise, that you had quite another perspective.

I'm always amazed by my friends who were reading Samuel Beckett back when I was reading Wonder Woman. I didn't think about books much in those days. I took a creative-writing course in high school, but only because it allowed me to skip gym.

I only have a certain bag of tricks. And that's why little things, like punctuation, make such a big difference. The dash I've always relied on hugely. I know I use it even in borderline cases, where technically it isn't correct. But it moves me through the initial draft of the text, and I let a lot of my dashes stay.

The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.

But I've come to realize writing's not a noble calling. Like you said, it's all about marketing, isn't it?

The 500 years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire were dubbed by the poet Petrarch 'dark.' Although the 14th-century Italian was referring to a literary decline, the term caught on to denote the seemingly backward turn the Western world took with regard to religious and technological developments.

Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There's nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world - like we are called the Third World.

Well documented, the relationship of literature to myth in the Western world has undergone much change over the millennia, as first the age of gods fell away before the notion of a single god, and then, for many people, that single god slipped away, too.

War stories, westerns, spy stories are all accepted as respectable because they are read by men. It is only women's light reading which is derided.

My uncle Randall always had a book in his hand. He read in the car, he read at restaurants, he read when you were talking to him. He read lots of different things, but mostly it was Louis L'Amour's westerns and contemporary thrillers.

My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read.

I like westerns, fantasy, sci-fi, graphic novels, thrillers, and I try to avoid the word 'genre' altogether. A good book is a good book.

I haven't read hardly any Westerns, to tell you the truth.