Quotes About Literature

the chief reason that [A Wrinkle in Time] was rejected for over two years and by thirty-odd publishers was because it is a difficult book for many adults, the decision was made to market it as a children's book; it won a medal for children's books.

Juvenile or adult, War and Peace or Treasure Island, Pride and Prejudice or Beauty and the Beast, a great work of the imagination is one of the highest forms of communication of truth that mankind has reached. But a great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or to agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.

The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think.

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.

In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone, and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader know each other; they meet on the bridge of words.

read a poem every day and think about it

Love books, love life

The book. Calming object. Held in the hand.

With my sort of book there's no resolution, because there's no solution. The problems aren't answered in the end because there is no answer. They're problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It's not a beautiful world.

No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.

Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be.

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

There is a place for hyperbole and I believe it's the back jacket of books

We are what we read. It's probably better that way.

Under the Volcano" embraces everything from Dante to Freud to the cabala. Here it shambles like Cervantes, there it rages like Ahab, and every page of it pulsates on Out of Body Auto-Reply, that style of pure Lowry that points at once backward, to all European literature, and forward, to the mother of all nervous breakdowns.

Fitzgerald's] latter work represents essentially best qualities of chivalry and decency now too often lacking in the English themselves.

In worldly terms, she was totally innocent; Eve before the fall, with no knowledge of good and evil. She made one realize how necessary the Fall was; without it, there would have been no human drama, and so no literature, no art, no suffering, no religion, no laughter, no joy, no sin and no redemption. Only camera work (towards which Mrs. Dobbs's painting was reaching) and sociology (which her sister, Beatrice Webb, may be said to have invented).

I must also leave you to analyze the cultural decline of Western art and literature. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as a priest and ends as a clown or buffoon. Examples of buffoonery in twentieth-century art, literature and music are many: Dali, Picasso, John Cage, Beckett.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

Don't learn literature from a history teacher.

A good book is not the same as a successful one.

All the successful personalities had one common element, they all liked reading books.