Quotes About Literature

A los doce años, James Joyce escribía cartas dignas de atención; yo, con la misma edad, corría por el campo en pos de las vacas y no había leído un solo libro.

Aki meg akarja érteni Afrikát, az olvasson Shakespeare-t.

En aquel entonces, la literatura parecía serlo todo. En ella se buscaba fuerzas para vivir, señales para enfilar uno u otro camino, una revelación.

A moment later, Schrift reappeared in a striking pair of undershorts, with vertical stripes like French wallpaper. "Now, for openers," he began, extracting the trees from a pair of suède chukker boots, "did you read this new best seller Valuta, by Waldemar Knobnose!" "Only the first eighteen pages," I admitted. "The woman whose copy it was got off the bus at Altman's.

An author doesn't have the moral right to violate truth and take refuge in the claim that he/she is only a creative artist.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name. (Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe

We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.

I grew up kissing books and bread

Did you know, ji,' Zulu offered, 'that the map of Tolkien's Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are right here, in our midst.

Is it possible to be jealous of written words?

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.

no doubt much will be said elsewhere by the armies of bigotry and punditry. Let them volley and thunder. I'll speak of bookish things.

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.

He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn't become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn't know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be. He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began.

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.

Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness

If one had never had the good fortune of meeting Borges, then meeting his library was the next best thing

The world of books continued to send him messages. Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise wrote from America to tell him that people were making I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE button badges and proudly wearing them as a sign of their solidarity. He wanted one of those badges. Maybe Joseph Anton could wear a badge in solidarity with the person he both was and was not. Gita Mehta told him by telephone, a little waspishly, that "The Satanic Verses is not your Lear. Shame is your Lear.

Ich würde lieber im Kampf um große Dichter sterben als in einem Krieg um Götter.

Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO