Quotes About Literature

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.

To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so far as to doubt whether it can be anything else.

What a melancholy day! I said. Aren't you bored? Not particularly. I am reading.

the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.

An exile's only country is his country's literature.

We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.

Don't you read mystery novels?" "Not very often. Anyway, what does that mean, 'mystery novel'? What is a 'detective novel'?

I've read Hamlet, I know men suffer.

I love the literature that these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not. Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they know more about women than we know about ourselves.

Books were my church but even more my native land, my place of refuge, my DP camp. I was an exile early on, but exile welcomed me; it was were I belonged.

Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without mediation-such that what she says and how she says it are not determined by boundaries men have set for her?

I somehow think that it's better to screen inferior literature, which nonetheless contains the seed of something real- which can be developed in the film and grow into something wonderful as a result of going through your hands

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

Reading is a practice; good reading is a highly sophisticated practice. The practice has to be learnt.

Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage. Because of this, they learn to love their teacher.

I absolutely look at people's bookshelves. And I have some judgment. I mean, they're openly showing you themselves.

an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered

They have come dressed as robots or space goddesses or aliens because a writer has changed their lives.

Arthur Less's life with Robert ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less's life—Marcel Proust, that is—and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish.

What does one ever ask an author except: How? And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: Beats me!

The Russian novelist pulls his lush eyebrows together like the parts of a modular sofa.

Why the gay press doesn't review your books? They don't? They don't, Arthur. Don't pretend you haven't noticed. You're not in the cannon.

When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.

At its worst, privilege is blindness: Amid the vast literature on race and privilege, one especially useful book from a Christian perspective for those from the dominant culture is Paula Harris and Doug Schaupp, Being White: Finding Our Place in a Multiethnic World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).