Quotes About Literature

I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels.

'Peanuts' is a life-long influence, going back to before I could even read.

In literature there was always an epiphany - a tingling moment, sometimes buried - the pearl around which the whole work formed.

My mother was a Book of the Month Club devotee. I remember she always looked forward to Pearl Buck's books.

Pearl Buck was my mother's favorite author.

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the things they've done.

Inflated descriptions by the pen or exaggerated illustrations by the pencil.

There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.

When I was 20 I was immensely proud of the rows of grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics in my bookcase.

I could write about coal miners in Northern Pennsylvania, and people would ask if I was writing about my dad.

There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people reading 'Midnight's Children?' Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great.

I don't want to be famous per se, but I want to write books for as long as I can. And I plan on writing a lot.

Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

I do not see a necessary connection between proletarian literature and some set percentage of words which bring the blushes to a maiden's cheek.

Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.

I had English grammar book and started to teach myself. I read 'Catcher in Rye,' in Russian. I was amazed at freedom in 'Catcher in Rye!' Freedom to have those perceptions of life!

There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish he was dead.' Influence is perdition.

I think 'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned' might be a perfect book.

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit.

I grew up with Tagore and nobody ever expresses the emotion of love like he did and he understood women so well. He is the perfect man everybody dreams of, including me.

Dan Brown and the 'Da Vinci Code' have been around well over a decade now, and to be perfectly honest, both he and it have become a joke.

Frankly, the British always looked at this as a dumpy industrial area, but this was where Shakespeare lived and wrote and performed some of his greatest works.