Quotes About Literature

I never knew a sorrow that an hour of reading could not assuage, a great man had once said. Let's put it to the test.

those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung...

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

The more we deviate from those safe confines [of genre fiction], the more dangerous the story starts to feel, the less safe it is. Sometimes, it veers all the way into the super jaggedy realm of literature, which is really scary and often not escapist and intended to grind your face in the machete of reality.

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

It's a romantic novel," Jaenelle said in a small voice as he called in his half-moon glasses and started idly flipping the pages. "A couple of women in a bookseller's shop kept talking about it." Romance. Passion. Sex. He suppressed—barely—the urge to leap to his feet and twirl her around the room. A sign of emotional healing? Please, sweet Darkness, please let it be a sign of healing.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.

All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

Campaign Against Akhmatova Begins (1922) She ran from lamppost to lamppost, the wind slammed. Trotsky reviewed her in Pravda: One reads with dismay... and an unofficial Communist Party resolution banned her poetry (1925). She didn't notice, didn't know what a Communist Party was in those days. Fog choked the city. Russia's great poets were all about 35 years ol Scraggly trees wandered by the canal in dim sun.

They saw her moving quietly back there like a metaphysician in a novel

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

The apocalyptic aspects of horror, cyberpunk and surrealism, with a steady overtone of mental aberrations, are explored through the diverse arts of literature, music, film, art, comics and technology. -- In reference to the infamous, eclectic magazine, Cyber-Psychos AOD #8, 1999.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

And this would be fine if he lived in any other town, but in Dublin every fool had a novel on the go, so he was, as Hughie Snell liked to endlessly repeat, 'a eunuch in the great harem of Irish literature'.

How important is it to be 'important' as a writer?

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.