Quotes About Literature

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

I do not remember any proper children's books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

My first job was as an assistant in the local library. Self-fulfilling prophecy?

I was reading 'The Prophet' on my own when I was 10 years old.

Alan Moore is a prophetic writer.

In Israel, the role of the writer is dictated by the language in which you write. Writers see themselves as cultural prophets.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

McCarthy's prose in 'Blood Meridian' comes blazing from the Book of Revelation.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

I read some older books when I worked at Barnes And Noble, like some of the American classics. I read a lot of Hemingway. I fell in love with Hemingway's prose and with the way he wrote. I feel like he's talking to me, like we're in a bar and he's not trying to jazz it up and sound smart, he's just being him.

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.