Quotes About Literature

I can't really do much with Nietzsche. He is more an artist than a philosopher; he doesn't have the crystal-clear understanding of Schopenhauer. Of course, I value Nietzsche as a genius. He writes possibly the most beautiful language that German literature has to offer us today, but he is not my guide.

All of Spain is contained in DON QUIXOTE—-a decrepit society unaware the world has passed it by.

The fact that nine-tenths of all the smutty literature, artistic tripe and theatrical banalities, had to be charged to the account of people who formed scarcely one per cent. of the nation - that fact could not be gainsaid. It was there, and had to be admitted.

I even love the smell of books.

Books will change your life, Rennie," Mrgot told me, handing me a copy of A Room of One's Own. You have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else's life," Margot said.

I can easily do without people (there are days when I could easily do without myself), and … in the country of books where I dwell, the dead can count entirely as much as the living.

We lie under the sheet after making love, speaking of loneliness relieved in a book relived in a book so on that page the clot and fissure of it appears words of a man in pain a naked word entering the clot a hand grasping through bars: deliverance What happens between us has happened for centuries we know it from literature still it happens sexual jealousy outflung hand beating bed dryness of mouth after panting there are books that describe all this and they are useless

Even before I wholly knew I was a lesbian, it was the lesbian in me who pursued that elusive configuration. And I believe it is the lesbian in every woman who is compelled by female energy, who gravitates toward strong women, who seeks literature that will express that energy and strength. It is the lesbian in us who drives us to feel imaginatively, render in language, grasp, the full connection between woman and woman.

sleep comes hard. I'd rather lie awake and read.

Reading and writing aren't sacred yet people have been killed as if they were

What happens between us has happened for centuries we know it from literature still it happens

My passion for books has changed my life.

Robert Jordan, whether he's writing with passion or not, I don't know.

I was passionate about reading from an early age, and I would always be carrying a different book each week.

I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.

I grew up loving books and stories. Reading became my favourite pastime, and you have to be a reader before you can be a writer.

I do like Pat Conroy, and 'The Great Santini' is an iconic book.

I have so little patience with the whole Y.A. book thing. As far as I'm concerned, you either read books for children or you read books for adults.

My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.

The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

When you live in Brooklyn, if you throw a rock, you'll hit a writer - Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Paul Auster.

I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

I couldn't pay attention to a novel; I'd get three pages in and couldn't remember what it was about.