Quotes About Literature

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

I want leisure to read—an immense amount.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later.

Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.

Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it.

her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.

What is a gentleman, anyway? He's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper.

there was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of he young breath-giving air.

I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition….

Those eyes, with the grayness and eternity of a cliff of soft granite, caught his.

that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition…. Then

Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read 'This Side of Paradise.

Books mean more than people to me anyway.

In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat.

About Ernest Hemingway] He's a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate.

As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough about anything to risk telling any one else about it.

He read at wine, he read in bed, He read aloud, had he the breath, His every thought was with the dead, And so he read himself to death.

I first read The Great Gatsby as a teenager; I imagine this is when most Americans encounter F. Scott Fitzgerald's seminal work.

Kiss me a paragraph and I'll reply with a novel

It was Dick's car, a Renault so dwarfish