Quotes About Literature

Precisamos de livros que nos afetam como um desastre, que nos magoam profundamente, como a morte de alguém que amamos mais do que a nós mesmos.

Kafka's fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It's a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there's no map.

If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for.

the task of literature is to reconnect us with feelings that might otherwise be unbearable to study but which desperately need our attention.

Le livre doit être la hache qui brise la mer gelée en nous.

Acho que devemos ler apenas os tipos de livros que nos ferem ou esfaqueiam. Se o livro que estamos lendo não nos acorda com um golpe na cabeça, para que estamos lendo?

Si le livre que nous lisons ne nous réveille pas d'un coup de poing sur le crâne, à quoi bon le lire ?

Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wie lieber hatten als und, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muss die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.

Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns." — Franz Kafka

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, What are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to.

Leave me my books! I have nothing else.

En cierta forma cuando escribo estoy a salvo (p. 52)

Toute littérature est assaut contre la frontière.

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.

I loved Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote 'The Little Princess' and 'The Secret Garden.' And I loved the 'Little House on the Prairie' books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.

I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse.

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

I always like Iain Banks science fiction stuff and William Gibson's cyberpunk stuff from the 1980s.

John Steinbeck is one of the most under-discussed and under-written-about of all American writers. He is way up there and should stand on a par, or even above, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

I think William Trevor is as good as it gets. Whenever I want a book to do exactly what it says it will, I read him.