Quotes About Literature

According to Dieter Hellfeld, a member of the Swedish Academy

Someday Neruda and Octavio Paz will shake hands. Sooner or later Paz will make room on Olympus for Neruda. But we will always be on the outside.

I used to read everything, Professor, I read all the time. Now all I read is poetry. Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game. I don't know if you follow me, Professor. Only poetry—and let me be clear, only some of it—is good for you, only poetry isn't shit.

Para ella la lectura estaba relacionada directamente con el placer y

Y después de coger a mi general le gustaba salir al patio a fumarse su cigarro y a pensar en la tristeza poscoito, en la pinche tristeza de la carne, en todos los libros que no había leído.

Ésta es mi última transmisión desde el planeta de los monstruos. No me sumergiré nunca más en el mar de mierda de la literatura.

yo me gano la vida escribiendo, muchachos, les dije, en este país de la chingada Octavio Paz y yo somos los únicos que nos ganamos la vida de esa manera.

Toda escritura es una marranada. Las personas que salen de la nada intentando precisar cualquier cosa que pasa por su cabeza, son unos cerdos. Todos los escritores son unos cerdos. Especialmente los de ahora.

La poesía chilena, dijo Bibiano aquella noche, va a cambiar el día que leamos correctamente a Enrique Lihn, no antes.

Ay Ulises Lima, escribía todo el tiempo (es lo que más recuerdo de él) en los márgenes de los libros que sustraía y en papeles sueltos que solía perder. Y nunca escribía poemas, escribía versos que luego con suerte ensamblaba en largos poemas extraños.

Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.

Es verdad que la vida y la literatura se entremezclan de una manera tan indisoluble como intensa

Un libro ti rimane addosso per una vita intera.

La letteratura è una somma di vite: vissute e non vissute.

De mí se dirá posiblemente que soy un escritor cómico, a lo sumo. Y será cierto. No me interesa demasiado la definición que se haga de mí. No aspiro al Nobel de Literatura. Yo me doy por muy bien pagado cuando alguien se me acerca y me dice: me cagué de risa con tu libro.

So -- I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me -- if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time.

I've been the reader sending that letter or small gift to a writer I've never met. I sent them because I wanted that writer to know that I'd met their characters. Their characters had become my friends. I hadn't read a story; I'd shared a life.

I don't finish books I don't like. There's too many good ones out there waiting to be found.

Robin Hobb is the author of the Farseer Trilogy, the Liveship Traders Trilogy, the Tawny Man Trilogy, the Soldier Son Trilogy, the Rain Wilds Chronicles, and the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy. She has also written as Megan Lindholm.

I hope that the examples I have given have gone some way towards demonstrating that pedestrian touring in the later 1780s and the 1790s was not a matter of a few 'isolated affairs', but was a practice of rapidly growing popularity among the professional, educated classes, with the texts it generated being consumed and reviewed in the same way as other travel literature: compared, criticised for inaccuracies, assessed for topographical or antiquarian interest, and so on.

Count calories if you like, but go ahead and gorge yourself on books. What have you got to lose but a small mind?

No matter what our age, we ought to never stop eating books, for books are the feast of the imagination.

Does Playboy still run fiction?" "I have absolutely no idea, Melinda," he said, grinning.