Quotes About Literature

It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women's shelf, and a gay shelf.

It's quite clear : an outsider can , on principle, only value foreign literature that translates well; the truly great artists of language and the fecund experimenters are inaccessible to him; are usually unknown to him in fact !

Im ganzen Buch kommt nicht einmal das Wort Corned Beef vor.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. If you have formed...literary taste...your life will be one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place.

I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

Only when poetry is read can it become a hobby, a habit, a daily necessity. Only so can it become 'literature', enjoyment of which is no longer confined to the solemn moments of life or to special festivities, but which may be drawn upon as desired merely to pass the time of day. Poetry thus loses the last remnant of its numinous character and becomes mere 'fiction', mere invention which can arouse aesthetic interest without claiming any element of conviction

Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

How much do you know about Shakespeare?'' I once asked a friend who has committed much of her life to studying the Bard. She replied, ''Not as much as he knows about me''. Remember this the next time someone tells you literature is useless.

Ik lees nauwelijks fictie. Onder ons gezegd en gezwegen, ik vind het iets voor verveelde huisvrouwen. Fictie. Dan Brown heb ik gelezen, omdat zoveel mensen dat kochten. Ik dacht, eens kijken of de massa smaak heeft. Maar dat was dus niet zo.

I guess it's like James Joyce when he was a kid, you know. He hung out with all the great writers of the day, and he was a little kid, like, with tennis shoes on, and they said 'Look at this lame!' They didn't use those words in those days. They said 'God, here comes this nut.' And he told them, 'I'm great!' And he sat with them, and he loved to be with them, and it ended up that he was great.

I'm not talking about YOUR book now, but look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What's the point? People haven't changed... Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust.

Paddy explained his increasingly wild behaviour as 'A bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature'

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

There is a big scholarly literature on the high correlation between creative genius and mental suffering, which Sigmund Freud termed "the problem of the creative artist."[12]

When I was taught Shakespeare in school, it was such an alien, sanitized puzzle, it made no sense.

Probably the biggest influence on me, strange though it may sound, was the 70s, a decade of invention. Growing up then had a huge impact on me. People wanted to experiment and were hungry for change. I was influenced by the literature and art of the time; listening to John Peel and Annie Nightingale and watching 'Monty Python.'

I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.