Quotes About Literature

Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer. Have any of you ever read the short story The Last Answer?

And while this might just be the cliché attraction that many students were fabled to feel toward their professors—although this seemed to work better for literature professors than for those teaching physics—he didn't care.

The first rule of book club - is that nobody wants to talk about book club.

The Bible had at best become like the work of Ovid or Homer: containing great truth, but not itself true.

This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.

In 1991 Susan Faludi published Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. A year later Marilyn French (bestselling author of The Women's Room in 1977) repeated the trick with The War Against Women. These hugely successful books thrived on the notion that although rights had been achieved there was now a concerted campaign under way to roll that progress back.

Books,' he said, like he might have said 'Jewels.

Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write. Read until your brain creaks.

Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.

One of the elements of writing that is most delightful to the engaged reader is the element of surprise. And one of the ways to surprise the reader is to set up an expectation that you then veer away from it at the last moment. A stitch in time saves the penny earned. Or something like that.

As Mark Twain supposedly said, a classic is a book that nobody wants to read but everybody wants to have read.

The writer must know something about the world outside books—whether his or the books of the others. At the same time, he must also be thoroughly acquainted with the world inside books. Words on a page are part of real life. They cannot be substituted for the whole, but they cannot be taken from it either.

Education is the process of selling someone on books.

A lot of aspiring writers quote the right people, but they do so like Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. They quote Austen like Mary quoted her eighteenth-century bromides, and were Austen here to see them do it, she'd slap them right into her next book, and it wouldn't be pretty.

Oh you liked the movie? The book is better

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

It has often been said there's so much to be read, you never can cram all those words in your head. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads. That's why my belief is the briefer the brief is, the greater the sigh of the reader's relief is. And that's why your books have such power and strength. You publish with shorth! (Shorth is better than length.)

Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.

Fiction Is My Addiction

No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

I have great pride in taking Dick and Jane out of most school libraries. That is my greatest satisfaction.

You can never, never have too many books

We walked together in the pages of those paperbacks and marched right out of the pages to walk – and eventually march – together in the streets.

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA made copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm rain down from the Communist sky.