Quotes About Literature

Depressed I went out into the heat that lay on the neighborhood like a hand swollen with fever in that season, and made my way to the library.

Para escribir hay que desear que algo te sobreviva.

E poi amavo la scrittura di chi ti fa affacciare da ogni rigo per guardare di sotto e sentire la vertigine della profondità, la nerezza dell'inferno.

Evocai versi e romanzi come tranquillanti. Forse, pensai, aver studiato mi serve solo a questo: a calmarmi.

Volevo scrivere storie piene di spifferi.

Há essa presunção em quem se sente predestinado às artes, sobretudo à literatura: trabalha-se como alguém que tivesse recebido uma investidura, mas de fato ninguém jamais nos investiu de coisa nenhuma, fomos nós que demos a nós mesmos a autorização para sermos autores, mas lamentamos quando os outros dizem: essa ninharia que você fez não me interessa, aliás, me entedia, quem lhe deu o direito.

L'oscenità, concluse, non è estranea alla buona letteratura e l'arte vera del racconto, se pure passa il limite della decenza, non è mai scabrosa.

La biblioteca per lei era una grande risorsa. Chiacchiera dietro chiacchiera, mi mostrò fieramente tutte le tessere che aveva, quattro: una sua, una intestata a Rino, una a suo padre e una a sua madre. Con ciascuna prendeva un libro in prestito, così da averne quattro tutti insieme. Li divorava e la domenica successiva li riportava e ne prendeva altri quattro.

No quiero leer nada más de lo que escribes. -¿Por qué? -Porque me hace daño

There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has ever invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors and yet we are resentful if others say: This little thing you did doesn't interest me, in fact it bores me, who gave you the right. (p.463)

She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.

that my cult of study had always seemed to her foolish, that it wasn't books that made people good but good people who made some good books.

Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.

I realized in a flash that the memory was already literature and that perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn't been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it's possible to sweep away all the veils—in fact, perhaps, it's a duty.

I don't want to accept an idea of life where the success of the self is measured by the success of the written page.

Sie verstärkte die Realität, während sie sie auf Worte reduzierte, sie flößte ihr Energie ein.

Leo muchísimo pero sin ningún orden, y olvido lo que leo.

Literary work couldn't seriously force the whirlpool of debris that constituted the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.

A woman who wants to write has unavoidably to deal not only with the entire literary patrimony she's been brought up on and in virtue of which she wants to and can express herself but with the fact that that patrimony is essentially male and by its nature doesn't provide true female sentences.

In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. And this crowd is certainly a blessing for literature.

Reading brought on a desire to write, and writing brought on a desire to read.

Literary genres are safe areas, solid platforms. There I can place a pale sketch of a story and practise with calm, wary pleasure. But really I am waiting for my brain to get distracted, to slip up, for other I's — many — outside the margins to join together, take my hand, begin to pull me with the writing where I'm afraid to go, where it hurts me to go, where, if I go too far, I won't necessarily know how to get back.

Everything, in writing, has a long history behind it. Even my uprising, my spilling over the margins, my yearning is part of an eruption that came before me and goes beyond me. Thus when I talk about my "I" who writes, I should immediately add that I'm talking about my "I" who has read (even when it's a question of distracted reading, the trickiest kind of reading).