Quotes About Literature

So they locked me up," Danskin said. "I feigned madness. I babbled, I recited Heine. Nine years. Here I am." They rode in silence for a while. "But you're still pissed off." "Now more than ever.

It seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we…should translate certain books, which are most necessary for all men to know, into the language that we can all understand, and…that all the young freeborn men…may be set to study…until a time when they are able to read English writing well.

In 1972, Samuel Guze and Eli Robins at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis reviewed the scientific literature and determined that in follow-up studies that lasted ten years, 50 percent of people hospitalized for depression had no recurrence of their illness. Only a small minority of those with unipolar depression—one in ten—became chronically ill, Guze and Robins concluded.

Today, according to the NIMH, bipolar illness affects one in every forty adults in the United States, and so, before we review the outcomes literature for this disorder, we need to try to understand this astonishing increase in its prevalence.9 Although the quick-and-easy explanation is that psychiatry has greatly expanded the diagnostic boundaries, that is only part of the story. Psychotropic drugs—both legal and illegal—have helped fuel the bipolar boom.

No te aconsejo leer a Poe, que inventó el relato plociaco y fue un gran poeta; ni a Conan Dpyle, el papá de Sherlock Holmes. ¿Sabes por qué? Porque sus dectectives son demasiados estrafalarios y cerebrales. No podrían resolver ni el caso más simple en nuestra caótica América Latina.

Amor, piedad, gratitud a la vida, a los libros y al mundo me galvanizaban el nervio azul del alma.

El primer mensual que cobré lo gasté en un montón de libros que hablaban de la mala vida. Me equivoqué, porque casi todos eran libros pornográficos… estúpidos… ésa no era la mala vida, sino la mala vida del placer… Y, quiere creerme, ninguna de mis amigas sabía explicarme, en substancia, lo que era la mala vida.

Il futuro è nostro, per prepotenza di lavoro. Creeremo la nostra letteratura, non conversando continuamente di letteratura, ma scrivendo in orgogliosa solitudine libri che avranno la violenza di un gancio alla mandibola. Sì, un libro dopo l'altro, e "che gli eunuchi sbuffino pure".

Reading is more important than writing.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen.

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him....

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can't think of a higher honor for a writer.

One should read Borges more.

I'm seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I'm in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I'm an orphan, and someday I'll be a lawyer. That's what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.

Le daría el consejo que nos dábamos los jóvenes infrarrealistas en México. Cuando teníamos 20, 21 años, teníamos un grupo poético, y éramos jóvenes, mal educados y valientes. Nos decíamos: vivir mucho, leer mucho y follar mucho".

A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.

La literatura se parece mucho a la pelea de los samuráis, pero un samurái no pelea contra otro samurái: pelea contra un monstruo. Generalmente sabe, además, que va a ser derrotado. Tener el valor, sabiendo previamente que vas a ser derrotado, y salir a pelear: eso es la literatura.

One of the inconveniences of stealing books—especially for a novice like myself—is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.

Ernesto San Epifanio dijo que existía literatura heterosexual, homosexual y bisexual. Las novelas, generalmente, eran heterosexuales, la poesía, en cambio, era absolutamente homosexual, los cuentos, deduzco, eran bisexuales, aunque esto no lo dijo.

This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published.

I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.