Quotes About Literature

I started to write when I was 11 or 12, doing bad imitations of Joyce. There were always white blossoms falling into the grave at the end of every story.

The Snow Leopard's Tale is mesmeric. Tom McIntyre has compressed so many things into so few pages that I can think of only a few other short books that can compare. It was worth the wait for all of us who look forward to reading anything with his name under the title.

The house of fiction has many windows ... sometimes such a simple thing as suggesting to a student that perhaps realism instead of fantasy may be a more sympathetic genre, or humor instead of the opposite, or the novel rather than the short story--sometimes a simple suggestion like that can be the one that makes things click.

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

All, or almost all, of the books were complete by the age of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE).

The books which were actively excluded (Chapter 11) were in nearly all cases considerably later and less reliable than those that were accepted.

For a long time I'd been fed on the wheat of The Imitation. It was the only book which did me any good, as I hadn't discovered the treasures of the Gospels. I knew every chapter by heart. I was never without this little book.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature. To say this is not to deny the expressive or imaginative quality of art, treating it as mere documentary evidence; the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist 's experience of the visible.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.He staggered—and, terrible-eyed,He brushed past the palms on the staircaseAnd was helped to a hansom outside.

To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.

You don't bother to memorise the literature—you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.

Ist doch mal wieder typisch dafür, wie es auf der Welt zugeht: Die Leute, die Bücher lieben, können sie sich nicht leisten, während die Leute, die genügend Geld haben, Betriebswirtschaft studieren, damit sie noch mehr Geld einsacken und dafür sorgen können, dass die Buchleser auch in Zukunft machtlos bleiben. Dem armen Volk bleibt nur die öffentliche Bibliothek.

Literature is an investment of genius which has dividends to all subsequent times.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to Literature, summer the tissues and blood.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. —The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 183

This is a feminist bookstore. There is no humor section.

literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning.

Dickens' hypocrites are the prime beneficiaries of his inventive genius. The heroes and heroines have no imagination. We could scrap all the solemn parts of his novels without impairing his status as a writer. But we could not remove Mrs. Gamp or Pecksniff or Bounderby without maiming him irreparably.

Literature has been our salvation, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

A page of good prose remains invincible.