Quotes About Literature

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.

I had had a classical education prior to that.

I think Roland read 'Primal Scream' first and then gave it to me. This was, I think, even prior to 'The Graduate' days. We both got heavily into and it offered a lot of questions about how screwed up our home life was.

I loved to read books in the free world, and there was a lot of time to sit around and do nothing in prison. When you read, it opens up your mind; it helped us take our minds away from where we were.

It's always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him.

To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.

Though you'd never know it from reading the academic literature, some people in minority communities even see prison as potentially positive for individuals as well as for communities.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

I would say 'The Chill' by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature.

About my books, that's all that I think the public has, in its normal way, to know. My private life is, by definition, private.

One of the reasons it is considered such a privilege to sit on a Man Booker jury is because it is famously rigorous. The judging is not a gig for lightweights. Not only are all five judges expected to have read all 155 books from beginning to end, but they have to be able to talk fluently about every book at length.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize.

I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.

One good thing about leaving daily journalism was that I was no longer obliged to read all the book prize short lists.

I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living.

There can be no better prize for a writer than one awarded by an international book fair.

Although I could read before I went to school, and I won the school reading prize at five years old, my early children's stories came from the radio and watching films at a cinema on Saturday mornings in Australia. It wasn't until I was nine years old on a ship returning from Australia that I was introduced to children's books.

I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books.

People say 'chick lit,' and what they mean is 'crap.' And so even though you might sell 100,000 copies of a book, you're never going to win a prize. These are books that people don't just read, they devour them - they stay up into the early hours because they want to devour them.

In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual.

I haven't won any prizes or had any best sellers.

I've been very lucky with prizes. But the thing about prizes is that, when you talk about a prize-winning author, you can be talking about one that is well-regarded but doesn't sell any books.