Quotes About Literature

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

One of the most memorable things I hear is when someone tells me that my books got a reluctant reader to read.

What sort of person you grow into should not be achieved by default, and often that's exactly what happens to kids. I see literature as a method of guidance, information, and contemplation, and consider it the greatest compliment possible when a reader tells me that a book of mine really made him/her think.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?

One day, when my son was eight, he came into the kitchen while I was cooking and said: 'You put bad words in your books, don't you?' No doubt he had overheard my mother, who often tells people who ask about my work: 'Well, you'll never find her books in the Christian bookstore.'

At 14, I started reading popular scripts, wanted to learn Telugu, read books and improve my language. Then I got married at 15.

I may not write poetry in Telugu but I need to get the nuances right.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Of all the art forms that my family dabbles in, writing suits my temperament the most.

There are the tears of rage when books get praised when they're so obviously garbage. But then there are so many more that continue to move me: the end of 'Paradise Lost,' 'The Ruined Cottage' by Wordsworth, Prospero's 'Our revels now are ended' speech near the end of 'The Tempest.'

I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example.

Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.

I never liked the way the professor used the books — zeroing in on "the text," raking and raking, sifting and sifting it through narrower and narrower filters.

read to each other from novels by George Eliot and Dickens and Hardy and Tolstoy during my elementary school years. My brother Bill (now a professor of English)

She like history . . . and wished the English teacher would ask the class to read history books. Instead the teacher was 'always' assigning poems.

I learned my realism from guys like Kafka.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

translation. The first indication that Carroll

his style. "Brighten it, brighten it, brighten it!" he once instructed his subeditor W. H. Wills, after reading an article that was insufficiently "Dickensian

Dickens gave his readers history on a human scale.

I can say with confidence that no man, however mature, ever loved reading for its own sake more than I. I did not read because of any particular urge for learning, or to merely pass the time, or to escape the realities of life. I read simply because I loved reading for its own sake alone. The printed page was like wine to me."—Robert E. Howard (from One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis)