Quotes About Literature

The unfortunate thing about our age of transition is that the present system of education, which is a class system, has made culture a class privilege. The workers, who are in the vanguard of our country's rebirth, are not the ones who possess the literary means of expressing the heroic experiences they are living. And conversely the writer, usually molded by the bourgeoisie, has been cut off from practical social activity, from the world of labor.

Those left at home, the Amises, Murdochs, Drabbles and Byatts, subsisting in an England that has 'been too cosy, too easy to live in', have avoided the shocks of the life overseas and hence have had to 'make literature out of suburban adultery'.

Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.

The canons of literary taste as they have hardened in the twentieth century leave little place for Rabelais.

There is something about a literary work- its vision, its transparence, its metaphoric quality- that makes it very strong magic.

if you want to convince children of the power of books, don't tell them stories are good. Tell them a good story.

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

The Text is not a definitive object.

The Text is without a source -- the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

Casa Ministieri in the North End and presenting me with the entire collected works of Dostoevsky, a rare edition, which I kept on a shelf at the office but hadn't had a chance to look into yet….

Everything you need to know can be found in a book.

reading their books on electronic gizmos

Je devais un jour opter pour la littérature, qui me paraissait le dernier refuge, sur cette terre, de tous ceux qui ne savent pas où se fourrer.

Jis vert? mane skaityti Prust?, Tostoj?, ir Dostojevsk?,- pareišk? vargšel?, nužvelgusi mus šird? verian?iu žvilgsniu. - Kas gi su manim dabar bus?

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

the public will only stand genius in infintesimal doses,sprinkled with mannerisms and fashionable literature...A fashionable genius!Doesn't that make you laugh?..what a waste of power!

Literature "has always been the last refuge, in this world, for those who do not know where to lay their dreaming heads.

I believe that the poetic incompetence of some bigoted linguists has been mis­ taken for an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us here, however, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachro­nisms.

I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.

Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.