Quotes About Literature

Like all really nice people, you have a weakness for detective stories, and feel that there are not enough of them. So, after all that you have done for me, the least that I can do for you is to write you one.

Antony could never resist another person's bookshelves. As soon as he went into the room, he found himself wandering round it to see what books the owner read, or (more likely) did not read, but kept for the air which they lent to the house.

Oh, Kanga," said Pooh, after Rabbit had winked at him twice, "I don't know if you are interested in Poetry at all?" "Hardly at all," said Kanga.

What else? Well, she belongs to a book review club, one her mother helped start, that meets once a month in some Highland Park home. If it's a particularly interesting home, she'll go.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

Her soul belongs ?to words and? books. Every time she ?reads she ?is home

Dilin geçirdi?i bu serüveni, yani susmay?, bir ?ey önermemeyi, uzakl???, kendi d???na ç?kmay?, cinneti, daha nice ?eyi bütün ba?yap?tlarda bulabiliriz." ?lhan Berk, 'Poetika', sayfa 12

I read and reread these pages all day long as I sat next to the cast-iron stove. In the absence of coal, we burned wooden boards pilfered from the rubble of destroyed houses in order to keep warm in these chilly early days of spring. In times of plenty my appetite had always been small, but now I often went hungry.

Hay vidas más tristes que el más triste de todos los libros".

Leo. Es como una enfermedad. Leo todo lo que cae en las manos, bajo los ojos: diarios, libros escolares, carteles, pedazos de papel encontrados por la calle, recetas de cocina, libros infantiles.

There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

The purpose of books is not to be read. I buy books not to read them. I own a lot of books. I write books, I collect books, I think about books, I copy books, I pay for books – I'm in the book business. But I don't read books.

Don't blurt out your theme. Let it emerge from the story. If you must come out and say it, do it in dialog, not narration.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

What is the point of literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway

And at school there was little or no time for those other stories, just an orderly accumulation of the real knowledge they brought to us, in books they made available to us, in a language they taught us.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Soy optimista: los gobiernos crecientemente desastrosos que he visto desde que tengo uso de razón -escribió [Castillo] en 1982 en respuesta a una pregunta acerca de si vivía de la literatura-, me han hecho entender a Nietzsche: lo que no me mata me hace fuerte. Y si el dolor y la desgracia capaz de soportar un hombre son la medida de su fuerza, mi pueblo y yo somos invulnerables.

At times, I have been convinced that books hold all the material of life--at least all the stuff that fits between an A and a Z.

Overall, my books represent a kind of shared communion and meditation with my fellow human beings… The books are also a part of what I call the great continuum of spiritual literary dialogue that I feel has been in progress since human beings first gave in to the urge to pray to their sense of something greater than themselves and interpreted certain signs or events or silences as responses to those prayers.