Quotes About Literature

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

I'm not as good a prose writer as I'd like to be, but I never aspired to that.

When I ventured into writing at the age of 17, I wanted to be a good and successful writer. I just wanted to write good stuff - poems, prose, stories, essays, everything.

I always think of Ireland as a place for complex ideas and prose. I like Irishness. I like Irish culture and Irish literature.

The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

There aren't many children's books about black characters that are just going on adventures. My library has over 2,000 children's books in it, and most of the protagonists are either white or creatures.

The goals of literature are multifold, but creating nice, positive protagonists that you'd want to grab drinks with or invite home to mom can hardly be considered one of them.

The only thing that's really important is the stuff he wrote. That's what he cared about, and that's what's worth protecting. The myth and the man time eventually separates. But the work endures.

Shakespeare and Co dedicates itself to a shared, heady and outdated ideal that is scarce in our protective and fearful age.

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church.

Books are an ancient and proven medium. Their physical form inspires passion.

I'd like to provide an SAT word in everything I do.

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

I like being able to provide consistent and frequent literary choices for my fans.

Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.

Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

No one will write books once they reach heaven, but there is an excellent library, containing all the books written up to date, including all the lost books and the ones that the authors burned when they came back from the last publisher.

Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.

I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.

To the American, English writers are like prim spinsters fidgeting with the china, punctilious about good taste, and inwardly full of thwarted, tepid and perverse passions. We see the Americans as gushing adolescents, repetitive and slangy, rather nasty sometimes in their zest for violence and bad language.

It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone except those with whom he most consorted.

As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough to risk telling anyone else about it. There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

Apenas se deviam ler os livros que nos picam e que nos mordem. Se o livro que lemos não nos desperta como um murro no crânio, para quê lê-lo?