Quotes About Literature

Gone with the Wind" are just as decisive as the Oedipus complex

Ecrire pour faire advenir un peu de vérité. Mais que cette vérité ne soit pas advenue seulement pour une élite.

E forse il vero scopo della mia vita è soltanto questo: che il mio corpo, le mie sensazioni e i miei pensieri diventino scrittura, qualcosa di intelligibile e di generale, la mia esistenza completamente dissolta nella testa e nella vita degli altri.

J'ai toujours voulu écrire comme si je devais être absente à la parution du texte. Écrire comme si je devais mourir, qu'il n'y ait plus de juges.

9 h 25. Je le savais, mais tant que les choses ne sont pas dites (ou écrites : en littérature, sans détours, ni allusions), elles n'existent pas.

The most intense part of her life is the time she spends immersed in the books she has insatiably consumed ever since she learned to read.

Pour comprendre le génie de Proust, il faut avoir vécu cela, Albertine disparue. Je revis vraiment La prisonnière et Albertine disparue (La fugitive, comme titre, me plaît moins).

She has no defined self, but "selves" who pass from one book to another.

On découvrait le "nouveau roman", Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, Sarraute, on voulait l'aimer mais on ne trouvait pas en lui assez de secours pour vivre.

Ver con la imaginación o volver a ver por medio de la memoria es el patrimonio de la escritura.

Pour un homme. Et quand je le vois, là, dans le hall de l'ambassade, je le trouve insignifiant, joli garçon, c'est tout. Je relis Anna Karenine.

Individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.

Reading literature makes us better people.

He would have enough money...for a family that would fill his house with beautiful music and the silence of good books.

They come as a boon and a blessing to men, The Pickwick, the Owl, and the Waverley pen.

I'm a big lover of Shakespeare. In fact, the only plays that I've ever done professionally in New York have been Shakespearian.

Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.

There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery.

My dad was an English professor.

'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

I went to a British Council event a while back and there were lots of German professors of literature. About half of them were convinced I had a German sense of humour and the other half were sure it was British. They are probably still arguing about it now.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

Complex literary works demand an effort from the reader that is becoming harder to justify, given the sink-or-swim pressures to make profitable products for a global marketplace.