Quotes About Literature

I want to do something splendid... Something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead... I think I shall write books.

Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.

I always read Jane Austen during wars. Her complete lack of interest in Napoleon's activities has a soothingly insulating effect.

Publishers now act as if writing is the same as typing.

Literary history teaches us that enormously successful writers are often members of a cohort of creative people who, as they mature in their field, help one another achieve success. The work of each member of the group gains more notice than if each had worked in isolation.

When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed, even if the book was no good.

For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery.

Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haine Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai

I'm still not strictly rational. How could I be? I sell books.

What I'm trying to say is that a certain sentence of the book—a written sentence, a very powerful sentence—killed Flora.' Louise was silent. After a few moments she spoke. 'I wish I could write a sentence like that.

Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendahl Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

I had planned to write the great American novel, having the Standard Oil Company as a backbone!

BY the 1880s, as his health was fading

Many people knew that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were the authors, but the trio proclaimed their authorship to only a chosen few and then mostly after the first bound volume was published in March 1788.

My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it.

He was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say 'The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges, Thomas Wolfe declares at the end of Look Homeward, Angel, and those words I spoke aloud to the bathroom mirror that summer, and thought of Wolfe in New York, writing between journeys to the West, and of Hemingway traveling from Paris cafés to African veldts. "YOU'RE

I'm glad I can still sometimes drug my senses with a book.

At which vision, of continual middle age, the younger Miss Flowerman fainted.

La literatura está llena de cosas inútiles absolutamente necesarias

Todos estes livros, reparo, estão a mudar-me por dentro. Eu não podia imaginar que isto de ler era como viver.

Cuando nos gusta un libro, siempre nos parece que sus páginas nos hablan directamente al corazón, que sus palabras son nuestras. Y en alguna medida es cierto que es así, porque al leer completamos la obra, la interpretamos, la enriquecemos con nuestra necesidad y nuestra pasión.

El arte es una herida hecha luz, decía Georges Braque. Necesitamos esa luz, no sólo los que escribimos o pintamos o componemos música, sino también los que leemos y vemos cuadros y escuchamos un concierto. Todos necesitamos la belleza para que la vida nos sea soportable. Lo expresó muy bien Fernando Pessoa: La literatura, como el arte en general, es la demostración de que la vida no basta.

La literatura nos hace formar parte del todo, y en el todo, el dolor individual parece que duele un poco menos. Pero además el sortilegio funciona porque, cuando el sufrimiento nos quiebra el espinazo, el arte consigue convertir ese feo y sucio daño en algo bello.

los escritores escribimos mucho mejor de lo que hablamos)