Quotes About Literature

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature.

Without literature my life would be miserable.

Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story.

Experiencing life through a book can help you learn without all the pain of going through the experiences first hand.

They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself.

Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.

The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think it's the thing we do best.

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?

When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.