Quotes About Literature

With no reason to hide these words I feel, and no reason to talk about the books I read, but still, I do.

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.

Do not read good books-life is too short for that-read only the best.

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

I went to the library and began to read some stuff on my own. My discovery of James Baldwin was life-changing. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain first, and that was hugely impactful.

Literature acknowledges that life is complicated.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.

Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

A poem's life and death dependeth still Not on the poet's wits, but reader's will.

If I wasn't an actress I'd want to be a writer or else find a job where I got to read books and watch movies all day, everyday, for the rest of my life.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.

I've lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me.

Life has changed enormously, and I hope - I hope more people read good things.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

The principle of literature is devotion to the particulars of life.

What more can life hold, than to know that because of your story, somebody out there has decided to read again!

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

Really, I think among the many mistakes I've made over my life, one of them was caring so much about the short story.