Quotes About Literature

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

I think it is immensely difficult to get the U.S. interested in non-U.S. topics. I don't think this is because the average American reader is disinterested, but more because of publishers playing it safe: if a thriller based in L.A. is a sure winner, why spend money plugging one based in Paris - or Bangkok?

The Hunger Games' is for eighth-grade girls! Winners read 'The Art of War!'

When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 88, she was the oldest person ever to receive the prize and one of only 11 female winners in its history. Her award was the end of a very long journey from a remote farm in Rhodesia to a banquet at Stockholm's Stadshus, the grand city hall in Stockholm.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

If you're going to do Shakespeare, do Shakespeare. There's a reason why he's been performed for hundreds of years. His words affect people on a very deep level. He's the true humanist. That all comes through his text, his words.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.

Nobody ever asks me why my characters don't text each other. Besides, as soon as you put something 'electronic' in a book, it's already out of date by the time it's published: everything will have changed. Human emotion, on the other hand, will never change.

In most countries, property law means that people can take possession of manuscripts and, in some circumstances, a lone copy of a printed text. In these cases where only one copy of the work exists the owners of the manuscript also find themselves in possession of its literature. Yet the two things ought not to be conflated.

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie.

I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?

I live for the text. It's my job.

Old Arabic books, printed in Bulaq, generally have a broad margin wherein a separate work, independent of the text, adds gloom to the page.

Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.

I don't want to read a book on a device. I like a book with a hard cover and text on a piece of paper. I like magazines. I don't care if I carry around 100 lbs. of magazines; I'd rather do that than look at them on the Internet.

A Christmas Carol' is one of a few literary works that can be cited as a common cultural reference point, so its a text people imagine theyve read without having done so.

As a kid, during the school year, my head was often buried in a textbook or Judy Blume book; the words and pictures were the perfect, barrier-free environment for me.

I first got caught up in this marvelous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and had found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook.

I just started to put texting and phones in my books. I want my books to be read 20 years from now; I don't want them to be dated.