Quotes About Literature

Arundhati Roy has been called many things, including a terrorist.

I've read a lot of Terry Pratchett's stuff, probably from when I was, like, 14.

If you're looking for a book that's not been influenced by 21st century popular culture and that's guaranteed to be a good read because it's stood the test of time, you can't go wrong with the classics.

That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.

What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

I can well imagine that certain writers, even writers that we'd consider today very great writers, may not necessarily have tested highly on IQ just because of their numerical skills, or maybe they may not be very good at memory, and are not particularly good at these kinds of tests.

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.

Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.

vanilla and turf smells of old books.

A nursery rhyme character...they don't like that term. They prefer "Preadolescent Poetic Personalities".

This is not the way things are done in Boy's Own Adventure books. I recall no mentions of homosexual gang-rape and cannibalism

Well there's these things called books.... They are like TV for smart people

Give me a room whose every nook is dedicated to a book.

Thus were first enunciated what would become recurring themes of jihad literature throughout the centuries to today: piety in Islam will bring military victory. Allah will send angels to fight with the believing Muslims, such that they will conquer even against overwhelming odds.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It's not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America.