Quotes About Literature

When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.

But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.

I might also say, regarding reviews and reviewers, that I have yet to read a review of any of my own books which I could not have written much better myself.

Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely; at least I hope so.

We're all Beckett's children. Harold is probably more noticeably influenced by Beckett than I am ... I might be an adopted child.

Read the great stuff but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

A play is fiction -- and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.

The best place to find things: the public library.

We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.

Convicts on the main line sent me books from the library. I've always been able to make it if I could read.

Reading taught me that prison had been the crucible that had formed several great writers. Cervantes wrote much of Don Quixote in a prison cell, and Dostoyevski was a mediocre writer until he was sentenced to death, commuted within a few hours of execution, and then sent to prison in Siberia.

The usual consolations of life, friendship and sex included, appealed to Newton hardly at all. Art, literature, and music had scarcely more allure. He dismissed the classical sculptures in the Earl of Pembroke's renowned collection as "stone dolls." He waved poetry aside as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." He rejected opera after a single encounter. "The first Act I heard with pleasure, the 2d stretch'd my patience, at the 3d I ran away.

The best kind of book," said Barnaby, "is a magic book." "Naturally," said John.

Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book!

My desire is, that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book.

Book lovers never go to bed alone.

Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written.

Quien alguna vez ha leído con atención estos textos, ya no los podrá olvidar nunca. Estas historias han impactado interiormente a hombres y mujeres a lo largo de los siglos.

escrever é um bocado fazer respiração boca-a-boca ao dicionário de Moraes, à gramática da 4ª classe e aos restantes jazigos de palavras defuntas