Quotes About Literature

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

There were books everywhere, hundreds of them on shelves that had been designed to fit into every nook and cranny, and it goes without saying that anyone who collects books can't be all bad.

This was a woman who didn't just go to bed with a book. She went to bed with a library.

Their proof-reader tried to kill herself. She shot herself with a gun.

Swear words in books have always struck me as lazy and over-familiar. But the 'c' word is more than that. It's used by sour, frustrated men, nearly always about women. It's a word full of misogyny – crudely offensive.

A novel is a container for 80,000 to 90,000 words and you might see it as a jelly mould. You pour them all in and hope they'll set.

We need our literary heroes. Life is dark and complicated but they shine out. They're the beacons that we follow.

Anthony Horowitz

Names have a way of stamping themselves on our consciousness. Peter Pan, Luke Skywalker, Jack Reacher, Fagin, Shylock, Moriarty. . . can we imagine them as anything else?

It was almost like discovering that Enid Blyton, in her spare time, had turned to pornography.

wonderful and reassuring about the idea that in the rush of modern life people will still come together and sit for an hour in a theatre, a gymnasium or a giant tent simply out of a love of books and reading. There's a sort of innocence about

There's something about Oxford that has always appealed to authors and it seems to me that it has somehow seeped into their work. Think of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch and, more recently, Philip Pullman. It's hard to imagine them living anywhere else.

was introduced to haikus when I was at school. I wasn't a particularly bright child and I remember liking them because they were so short.

Victorian novel, perhaps something by Wilkie Collins.

I had devoted my whole life to books; to bookshops; to booksellers; to bookish people like Charles and Alan. And in doing so, I had ended up like a book: on the shelf.

The Daily Mail had branded the books 'pure porn poison', which the publishers had cheekily reprinted on the cover.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

I can't even remember who said it, but the only way that book was going to change someone's life was if it fell on them.

Mary Westmacott, which was, in fact, Christie's nom de plume.

wanted to remind myself just how terrible it was: the awful language, the use of clichés, its near-pornographic relish. The books must have made Dawn Adams a ton of money, and as I'd learned from my time with Hawthorne, money and murder have a way of going hand in hand.

Each book was a friend.

I thought you'd have known that, you being a TV writer.

But that's impossible. They're full of pornography.' I searched for the worst thing I could say about them. 'They objectify women!