Quotes About Literature

and knew without doubt that I was living in a story Kafka would have been proud to write.

I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday, sweet and beloved, between its leaves.

I love books. I hope to grow up to have lots of them.

We are writing for children...not idiots.

As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? Yet they live eternally because—live germs as they were—they had the fortune to find a fecundating matrix, a fantasy which could raise and nourish them: make them live for ever!

Ma i libri [...] pesano tanto: eppure, chi se ne ciba e se li mette in corpo, vive tra le nuvole.

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die. And to live for ever, it does not need to have extraordinary gifts or to be able to work wonders. Who was Sancho Panza?

I can't believe how many students don't read. They want to be writers, but they haven't read anything at all. They have looked at book covers, which usually allows them enough expertise to sneer, but they haven't read the books. How many young poets don't like poetry? How many fiction writers don't know Lehane from Nevada Barr?

A má literatura é a literatura em estado puro, intocada por distrações como estilo, invenção, graça ou significado, reduzida apenas ao ímpeto de escrever.

if all else fails you can read

Who wants to be used? I love to read, so books are my main friends. They're always available, always friendly, and always interesting, and they never make me choose sides.

a feud over who was to own the poet: in the first instance, who was to have the right to publish her works; in the second, whose legend would imprint itself on the public mind.

Bolts of Melody, with more than six hundred unknown poems by Emily Dickinson, took the public by surprise in 1945.

Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson's punctuation may be to the way we read her.

This was a girl who could tell the difference between the page that perishes and the page that endures.

You should read Wodehouse when you're well and when you're poorly;when you're travelling, and when you're not;when you're feeling clever, and when you're feeling utterly dim. Wodehouse always lifts your spirits,no matter how high they happen to be already.

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket.

Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons

No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked uo on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is "ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly".

Good Lord, not again! What the devil is it with you and libraries that makes you unable to control yourself in them, James? You have always had a passion for books, but really! I fear she is right. I always have had a passion for libraries. Still, I never realised quite how much pleasure they could afford until I met you.