Quotes About Literature

When literature exists, perhaps we do not notice how important it is, but when it does not exist, our lives become coarsened and brutal. For this reason, I am proud of my profession, but also aware of its importance.

I am a stupendously fast reader and always have been. I can read in at least three languages fluently and two languages with a little bit more difficulty.

By the nature of cinema and how it literalizes what we envision, movies can have difficulty replicating that connection we make with a classic book.

I spent all day in front of a digital screen, but I'm about to curl up with a book.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.

I've learned to use big words. Because I'm an avid reader, I can prove myself as a smart and diligent person.

His knowledge of books had in some degree diminished his knowledge of the world.

I went back and reread the Dinosaur chapter in 'Our Band Could Be Your Life,' and it was so depressing.

Songs you can dip in and out of, but a book... well, it can overpower you.

England gave me a language and literature, the basis of what I am as a writer, but when I started writing more directly about my own experience, it wasn't England so much as what went before.

I love bookstores and booksellers. In my novel 'Dirty Martini,' I thanked over 3,000 booksellers by name in the back matter.

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

The baseline character in a lot of Western literature is a man. So we, as women, do a lot of suspending of our disbelief to experience a novel or a play or a movie through that male character.

I think all literature should be read as comparative literature. And I think we should write out of what we know, but in the expectation that we can be changed at any moment by something we have yet to discover.

I did not discover literature of any kind until I was about eleven, or ten.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film.

I discovered reading through libraries. I grew up in a house that wasn't brimming with books.

In a way, 'Billy Elliot' was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.

Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.

The experience of reading is very interesting because you put yourself in the character's shoes and everything they're discovering, you marry the experience.

Whatever I read went under my skin. I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery.

Malaria was one of the epidemic diseases with the most comprehensive records in traditional Chinese medical literature.