Quotes About Literature

The chances of satisfying my renewed appetite for literary exchanges increased once I began to visit the library more frequently and make my way from the hotel to City Lights Bookstore at 261 Columbus Avenue. For all I was learning about the role its founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, had played in helping to nurture, promote, and sustain the talented souls who made the Beat Movement possible, City Lights became a kind of sacred space for me.

Throughout my life, I've been a dreamer and a seeker, sharing my hopes of a better future for literature in Nepal. My concern is for humanity and I'm a person with optimism.

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the unsolved ones.

The things I want to know are in books my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

The reader, knowing nothing about the 'dark continent,' filled in the blanks. Pictured Stone in a tent, kerosene lamp held up by a Hottentot providing the only light, elephants stampeding outside while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another.

If one could read fluently, confidently, in every known language, one would have no need of translators or translations; one could read Homer on Mondays, Akhmatova on Tuesdays, Swahili poets on Wednesdays, and so on.

One thing I know, I love to learn. I love literature. With these books I can sail the seven seas, chase a white whale . . .

Out of his pen he was spinning gold.

My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness.

The blatancy of the icy-hearted satire repelled me.

Updike quashed the voice of his conscience, while at the same time clinging to a "me-first Salvationism.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist.

literature is a fiction that tells a deeper truth

She's read every word I've written," he said. "That's the truest way to know someone's heart.

Being in an M.F.A. is like living in a sci-fi biosphere on an alien planet, where everyone shares your obscure visionary notions: namely, that literature matters, that English professors know more than other people, that typing, alone, in a library, is what everyone should be doing on a Friday night. Better to tell strangers that speaking Klingon is what turns you on.

friend: "I am now at work on a poem of life among the gentry, in the style of Hermann and

Infinite Jest isn't a book, it's a fucking planet.

Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once.

Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Seneca, Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, William Inge, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Yukio Mishima, and John Kennedy Toole.

The Environmental Handbook appeared in January 1970, and the Sierra Club's Ecotactics came out in April. Both books were largely the work of the young. Both were huge hits. Sales of the handbook reached 1.5 million, while Ecotactics sold 500,000 copies.

Today I fell asleep reading a book. The book is called INSOMNIA. I win.

I read because I have to. It drives everything else from my mind. It lets me escape to find other worlds.