Quotes About Literature

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

for literature had always been a solace for him, something that the ugliness of facts could not spoil.

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

But books meant so much for him he forgot that they were a bewilderment to others.

Talk away. If you bore us, we have books." With this invitation Rickie began to relate his history. The reader who has no book will be obliged to listen to it.

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy –that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man's soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.

She had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married or succeeded in remaining engaged.

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air.

For life is practically a battle. To all intents and purposes a battle. Except for a few lucky fellows who can read books, and so avoid the realities.

Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense –the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

Epilogues are for Tolstoy

Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

He never did his dumb-bells or played in his school fifteen. But the muscles came. He thinks they came while he was reading Pindar.

O escritor americano Philip Roth, falecido neste maio de 2018, insistia que a literatura não é o "concurso de beleza moral" em que hoje se tenta transformá-la a golpes de politicamente correto, inclusão social e análogos.

and beneath his chivalry to Miss Quested resentment lurked, waiting its day - perhaps there is a grain of resentment in all chivalry.

There are some chaps who are no good for anything but books; I plead guilty to being such a chap. —Cecil Vyse

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

To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town.

when I don't have anything to read, I feel like a tortoise without a shell or a boat without an anchor. There is nothing to hide under. Nowhere to stop and rest. When I don't have a book, there is nowhere good or interesting to be, there is nobody to care about, nothing to hope for, and nothing to puzzle over. When I do have something to read, it keeps me breathing. It's the reward for all the other things. It's the think to look forward to, the reason for doing my day.

At Philippi, Bunny, where I said I'd see him. What a rabbit you are at a quotation! "'And I think that the field of Philippi Was where Cæsar came to an end; But who gave old Brutus the tip, I Can't comprehend!' "You may have forgotten your Shakespeare, Bunny, but you ought to remember that.