Quotes About Literature

When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.

I always start a book thinking that it can be something other than first-person present, and I always come back to first-person present. It's just the easiest way.

I've seen firsthand how books can change people's lives. It happened to me.

'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it.

Fitzgerald was a modernist.

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.

If you read some of the recent literature, there is no such thing as whiteness. But we made it up. Not my original thought, but it's true. Because you were born white, you have advantages systemically, culturally, psychology there. They have been built up for hundreds of years. Many people can't look at it.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.

Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

Humorous writing is often thought of as substandard in comparison to work with a more dramatic or tragic intent. I don't know what to say to this except that I disagree wholeheartedly.

To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade.

I love fiction's ability to allow me to inhabit a wholly different life.

When I write, I have a sort of secret kinship of readers in all countries who don't know each other but each of whom, when they read my book, feels at home in it. So I write for those readers. It's almost a sense of writing for a specific person, but it's a specific person who I don't know.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

If your reading habits are anything like mine, then you can remember the exact moment that certain books came into your life. You remember where you were standing and whom you were with. You remember the feel of the book in your hands and the cover, that exact cover, even if the art has changed over the years.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.

I was a promiscuous reader. I loved Nancy Drew books and Tom Swift - never the Hardy Boys - but I also read Dumas, Dickens, Poe, Conan Doyle, and Cornelius Ryan's war books. As to favorite character: I'm torn between Nancy, on whom I had an unseemly crush, and Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.