Quotes About Literature

Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot.

I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section.

I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.

It is surprising how many people who don't read believe they have a book in them. Why? Nobody would imagine that Alfred Brendel took up the piano on a whim at 25 when he found accountancy unpleasant.

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

Romance tends to be the whipping boy of genre fiction.

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

Shakespeare - I was very influenced - still am - by Shakespeare. I couldn't believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.

Don DeLillo's 'White Noise,' which I read when I was 19. It showed me that a book can be funny as hell and deadly serious.

I remember my fourth grade teacher reading 'Charlotte's Web' and 'Stuart Little' to us - both, of course, by E. B. White. His stories were genuinely funny, thought provoking and full of irony and charm. He didn't condescend to his readers, which was why I liked his books, and why I wasn't a big reader of other children's' books.

Books marketing has moved from the review culture to a preview culture.

Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.

One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'

I grew up reading 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' - girly kind of books.

Films are wonderful but they do fix an identity. I can't read 'Pride and Prejudice' anymore, for instance, without imaging Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.

'Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.