Quotes About Literature

I read the book [My Life by Bill Clinton] completely. And I think it compares very favorably with Ulysses S. Grant's gold standard of presidential autobiographies.

Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace.

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books.

This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.

As life tends to become more and more distracting, let us firmly hold on to books.

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.

For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

Literature has become my life.

The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.

...a nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.

The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.